| It's not just that. If you pay to shoot a lion, it's not going to be a young lion that will sire a lot of children. It will be an old lion that is actually reducing the potential population growth. This is a good thing if we want to increase the number of lions. Hunting is a necessary evil. In terms of US conservation locally, hunting is fairly highly regulated. It is actually needed in a lot of areas where people go hunting for deer due to natural predators no longer existing. If it wasn't for hunters, there would be large population growths of deer to the point where they begin to kill off other species that rely on the same food sources as well as starve themselves. In the past, before things were so regulated, it wasn't unusual for populations to be decimated by humans. Passenger Pigeons are now extinct; Deer, Bison, and Elk in certain areas were killed off. Heck, in Ohio, Deer were reintroduced after being decimated, so they would run-a-muck if there was no hunting unless they were to reintroduce wolves to the area (good luck getting people to agree with this). All of this is due to humans creating imbalances in nature that conservation is now trying to keep in check, and hunting is necessary for certain species which no longer have natural predators, or in the case of lions, to ensure males that will sire more children get a chance to. Here's some Ohio History on Fauna: https://ocvn.osu.edu/news/ohios-wild-history-frontier-fauna-... TLDR -- unchecked hunting bad, regulated hunting good |
Maybe...but nature actually does a pretty good job of taking care of the old lions. But your point stands in other situations.