The Trophy Hunter Boogeyman

I've seen the exact same exchange posted a thousand times.  Someone - a zoo or aquarium, a news station, or a visitor will post a picture or video of an animal on social media, usually of a large, charismatic mammal, like a giraffe or a grizzly bear.  Someone will then make a comment about how sad it is that the animal is in a zoo and not in the wild.  A third someone will then reply to that comment with one about how the animal is at least safe in the zoo and won't be shot by a trophy hunter, to which most of the other commentators will voice their agreement.

I'm phrasing this much more nicely than they generally do, by the way.

I was reading that exchange for the thousandth time today when something occurred to me.  None of these animals that we're talking about are really endangered because of trophy hunters.  With the exception of a few, heavily-poached species, such as rhinoceroses and elephants, most aren't even primarily threatened by hunting at all.  Rich American trophy hunters of the sort who pay for these extravagant hunting expeditions, such as the one which did-in the famous Cecil the Lion, are relatively few and far between.  Which got me thinking... why do we fixate on them so much?

The answer, I've decided, is because it's easy and it makes us feel good about ourselves without actually doing anything to help animals.

The people who do engage in trophy hunts tend to be wealthy or middle-class, white, and Western - just like many of the people who make these facebook posts.  Some of them may even be neighbors or professional colleagues.  It's easy for someone to say, "Hey, my Uncle Dan just went to Africa and shot a leopard.  I would never do such a thing.  That must be why they're endangered.  I'm not hunting leopards, so I'm doing my part to save them."

The thing is, your impact on the environment isn't determined by what you don't do.  It's by what you DO do.  That's like me saying, "My diet must be going well because I DIDN'T eat three whole fried chickens," while ignoring the fact that I didn't eat anything healthy.  Convincing ourselves that animals are endangered because of a few conservation super-villains lets the rest of us off the hook for the real causes - habitat loss, invasive species, competition for resources, etc.  Similarly, I'm convinced that a lot of the reason that people hate on SeaWorld is because they know that orca populations are dropping and it's easier to blame a for-profit corporation that doesn't actually interfere with their own lives than it is to face the specters of pollution and overfishing.

Conservation requires commitment, bold action, and, above all else, honesty.  If we want to save species, we need to face the reasons why they are really endangered.  Sometimes (not often, but sometimes), that means pointing the finger at some rich tourist we see on Facebook.  More often than not, it might mean pointing that same finger at ourselves.