THE IGNOBLE ART OF JOURNALISTIC DECEPTION

One can hardly have missed the recent furor in the US and around the world, stemming from the Dallas Safari Club's decision to auction an authorised black rhino hunt, all funds raised to be donated to efforts to bring the species back from the brink. One cannot have missed it so I'll not bother to recap. 

 

What I will do, however, is make a few points about the way this non-event has been manipulated and reported by an increasingly hostile and opportunistic media. 

 

Take the article "Hunter Corey Knowlton defends paying $388K to kill rare black rhino" for instance. I love the level of bias 'journalists' Mara Siegler and Emily Smith of the New York Post are bent on conveying in the guise of objective journalism. The Black Rhino is so rare there are only 5000 left "on the planet", they say, as opposed to Africa where the rhino lives....ON THE PLANET!  Instantly the issue has galactic or perhaps even intergalactic ramifications. 

 

Corey Knowlton's facebook page is not simply chockers with snaps of animals he has hunted, oh no! It is "filled with BLOODY IMAGES" of him "PROUDLY posing with animals he has KILLED". Followed by a list of the animals that the journalists calculated to cause the most outrage, a "GIANT BROWN BEAR" - I mean, everyone knows big = worth - and a record breaking Mako shark....as if Western Australia's recent vendetta against sharks hasn't fueled an emotive fire around the world. 

 

'Trophy buck' ... Corey Knowlton with a deer he shot in Texas using a crossbow. Picture: Facebook Source: Supplied

 

And then of course there's the reference to the "preservation of the magnificent, endangered species." If a species is worth saving, it should at least be MAGNIFICENT. Mundane species...not so much. 

 

Whining about the death of an individual, simply because it is a member of a charismatic species is both shallow and self-indulgently messianic to say the least. I know of no peer-reviewed scientific evidence that demonstrates either that a hen’s egg enters the world with a selfless willingness to have its natural span cut short on the edge of a frying pan, or that it is any more or less aware of its imminent fate than a MAGNIFICENT rhino or BIG Brown Bear might be of his.

 

The person who would eat a lamb-chop and venerate the role of the farmer in the community, while denouncing a man who would kill a rhino (legally) is simply playing a hand of individual favouritism. It's shallow and pathetic and for my money, marks out the individuals in the community least suited to engagement in debate about big ticket moral or governance issue. 

 

While I am a hunter, I have no interest in hunting a Rhino, but my personal disinterest in a practice doesn't automatically make that practice wrong. The last few words of the article's penultimate sentence hold the key to this debate, "No rhino is immortal." 

 

Game management best practice recognises that in order to increase a species it is often necessary to manage breeding stock by culling Alpha males, who, while still controlling a herd or haren, are often not the most potent males on the ground. These males are therefore removed from the population so as to take the 'dips' out of the population growth data that, while perfectly sustainable in an untrammeled natural world, are hugely counterproductive when the objective is to increase the species and diversify the gene-pool quickly in a changed world offering limited ranges and subject to pressures such as poaching. 

 

In short, the only thing at issue here is resources.

 

On one hand the rhino could be culled by local authorities, which costs money and returns nothing whatsoever to the regeneration of numbers, other than a corpse. On the other, the rhino has his fun and his death returns hundreds of thousands of dollars to the program.

 

Emotive claims such as I've seen on animal welfare sites, suggesting that if the hunter were really interested in the salvation of the species he would just donate $350,000 to the breading program and let the poor rhino live, betray a level of naivety and self-indulgent, uninformed stupidity of such depth as to beggar belief. Hunted or culled, the rhino is scheduled to have his life cut short. The only issue of relevance is how its death might be managed to best advantage for the health of the species, and returning more than a quarter of a million dollars to the cause is not a bad contribution to make. 

 

Of course a cashed-up preservationist might have bid for the rhino, chucked in enough additional cash to buy a few hundred acres of bush and set-up a trust-fund to keep him in hay and girls for the rest of his natural life...but they didn't did they. They didn't, simply because they recognise that it would be counterproductive to do so, because they also recognice that the rhino has to be culled, and because they get their gollies-off by whining about the evils of hunters and hunting. Pure manipulative, pontificating self-indulgence from an ilk that measures its worth in terms of how many non-issues it can get angry about, thus appearing to be superior to those more moderate thinkers, who prefer to consider an issue or practice before roundly condemning it.

 

And they are sooooo angry, as a quick trip to a hunters website will amply demonstrate.

There you will find myriad threats and expressions of profound and often fatal ill-will against hunters, their partners and even their children, all contributed by "animal lovers" and welfare advocates. 

 

Animal rights/welfare advocates threatening to kill people and maim their children...it's not something we see reported in the media is it?  Silly me...to do so would be tantamount to journalistic professionalism and ballance. Heaven forefend!

Anyway, I'll get outaya way now....