Back when I was in primary school in Kenya, a hyena ate three of my neighbor’s goats during the night. On discovering this horrible fact in the morning, she called for help from the villagers and soon her compound was teeming with spear-wielding villagers ready to hunt down the culprit. Within an hour, they had found the hyena and had put it to death; and I of course finally got a chance to put a face to that animal that always made horrible laughs at night.
Recently, when I read this AtlanticWire post, I was reminded of the fact that I have had the opportunity to live in two different worlds; one that has a media that ardently advocates for the rights of animals, and another that believes that destructive wildlife has no right to trample on and feed on their only source of livelihood. The video highlights a lot of realities about the two worlds:
First, we have the globe-trotting hunter-cum-attention seeker in the name of Bob Parsons. Of course it is true that Mr. Parsons did a great favor to the farmers whose crop was being destroyed. However, does this fact in any way give him any right whatsoever to use this situation as an advertisement platform for his company? Whatever the reasons he used to arrive at the conclusion that filming that ordeal and posting it online was the right thing to do, it is highly probable that he never obtained the consent of the villagers to film them wearing godaddy.com’s merchandise as they scramble to make a meal out of the dead elephant. It is also true that most of them will never get a chance to see the video in which he presents himself as their savior. He can get away with the elephant hunting stuff, but to use poverty-stricken villagers as an advertisement platform shows a lack of moral conscience in him. Coming to think of it, I actually can’t figure out what objective he had in mind when he posted that video.
If we abstract away from the elephant hunting part, how many videos and pictures have we seen that have the same dimensions as this one? When an NGO broadcasts videos to you about that famine in Somalia, what didn’t come to your mind?
Secondly, we have a failed state that is not only unable to manage its wildlife but also unable to care for its citizens. If foreigners can pay large sums of money to come and hunt in a country, what can prevent local communities in that country from hunting down those stray animals that destroy their crops? Even though Zimbabwe and other Southern African countries might have large elephant populations, they should stop and ask themselves what happened to the elephant population of East Africa. Not only are hunting safaris an exhibition of the innate love that some people have for killing animals, but they also show a reckless approach to environment conservation.
Whenever the media presents instances of human-wildlife conflict, most of the time, they do not stop and ask if the wildlife is of any economic value to the local community. It is true that wildlife tourism brings a lot of revenue to the state, but most of the time, the local community is not compensated enough for having to deal with the menace of stray wildlife. In fact, to the villagers, the wildlife is worth more dead than alive1. From my comfortable lawn in North Carolina, what right do I have to be angry with those farmers in Africa who actually have to deal with the menace of wildlife in their farms? Well, maybe we should think of ways of making the wildlife more valuable to them instead of berating them for being insensitive to the needs of wildlife.