The energy is running out, people are screaming. We are doomed with resource crisis, punished by our own wastefulness, scientists warn us. To us modern human beings, it seems that we are, all in a sudden, suffering from the evil entailments of modernization, and we have to hold back ourselves or we would be facing the end.
Conservation can be a controversial thing to say— as it’s formulated by schools of western “activists” who are well fed, never experienced hunger or inaccessibility to infrastructures. To us, the wild lives are far, far away in the mysterious, “volunteerism”, “they-need-our-aid” Africa and somehow we feel obligated to protect and conserve them. However, what do we have a say when we never lived side by side with the wild animals?
Recently, a special tourism “trophy hunting” emerged into the center of attention. People pay big bucks, flying to African and shooting protected, even endangered wild lives legally. This was of course harshly bashed by the morally noble Americans and some trophy hunters would receive death threats from environmental conservation groups many years after a hunting trip. On the other hand, trophy hunti
ng is continuously thriving and expanding in many Africa countries because of its value of creating jobs for the locals and getting rid of the living monsters, killing machines even, in their neighborhood. Black rhinos, for example, are critically endangered, but also extremely dangerous. The bulls are known to “go haywire” and destroy houses. They are also an important source of protein for the locals. When the choices are directly between food and some imported, vague idea of “we need to protect the monster who destroys our homes and kills our people”, the result seems very clear.
–Stacey Hou