For me, and I expect a lot of other people as well, the issue wasn't solely the fact that an elephant was shot.
It was Bob Parsons going to Africa in this "Great White Hunter" role, acting as though he were there to help the poor backwards natives who needed the elephant killed to protect their crops.
The reality is that he got a juvenile macho thrill out of the whole thing, from his patronizing handout of gaily colored GoDaddy hats for villagers to his gory video attempting to glamorize himself.
Yes, I love elephants and believe there are other ways to deal with some trampled crops besides shooting them. But the real point was what a lowlife Bob Parsons is, no matter what particular activity he's engaged in.
I'm a vegetarian and feel the opposite. I don't have a big problem with hunters, assuming they eat their game. But raising caged animals to be eaten is unnecessary cruelty.
Animals eat animals because they have no other choice, but humans have the knowledge and empathy to live without killing.
If your concern is feeding as many people as possible, wouldn’t it be best to ditch animals altogether? I would imagine that it’s more energy intensive to go from plants to animals to food than to go directly from plants to food.
This would be true if livestock ate human food. As it is they mostly eat things we can't, like grass, on land that is poor for agriculture. Feed corn usually just fattens them up there at the end, and I'm all for minimizing that disgusting process.
The idea that most of the meat we eat was once animals grazing on grass has sadly been untrue for a very long time.
Most cows, pigs, and chickens are raised in tightly-packed conditions, and fed things you really don't want to know about. There are grains in there, but a lot of nasty things get mixed in with them.
A lot of land that could go to raising human food instead goes to growing soybeans, corn and grain that are fed to livestock. You're right that we can't just divert the grains from animals to people, but if that land were used to raise human instead of animal food, we'd be able to produce 16x as much food by volume as we do with meat.
You can't justify one wrong by saying the average human does something worse. The average human is a vicious, barbaric monster. Both killing wild animals and eating animals from factory farms is wrong.
That's utterly irrelevant. I find elephants in the wild beautiful, worthy of protection, and not as far from endangered as you think. It's my personal opinion to find elephant hunters equivalent to scumsucking reprobates, and to direct my dollars away from their businesses.
By your logic, we should all universally also have no issue with hunting dogs or cats or really any goddamn animal not on the brink of extinction.
It was a culling. Too many elephants, not enough resources. That elephant wasn't hunted so much as scheduled for termination. And we do do the same thing with surplus dogs and cats here in the US at least.
Still, paying to do the shooting is even creepier than hunting an elephant. Forget the tracking, stalking, and pay to just enjoy the killing? Eww. Imagine the Humane Society auctioning off a day operating the kitty gas chamber.
I'm not familiar with the elephant hunts with regard to godaddy @ all, does anyone have a link? But I've heard that a lot of the wild game hunt trips in Africa actually cause animals to be raised, so the net result is an actual increase in the animals - not sure if it is relevant in this case or to you in general.
