Is Hunting Anything More than Cruelty to Animals?

I wanted to start a series called “Unpopular Truths.” I even just ordered the domain name unpoptruth.com and will be pointing it back to the “unpoptruth” tag of this blog.

It seems like every day we are embracing political correctness more and more. We formulate our opinions on feelings and emotion and never look deeper to find real truth in most matters. Why would we? Researching stuff is hard, right?

But in this social media age, it is so easy to create an emotional response that alters opinion in an instant. Take for example a recent post I saw. In the post was a picture of Donald Trump’s sons on a big game hunt in Africa attached to a petition to Trump that said “Stop Encouraging Your Sons to Murder Defenseless Big Game.” At the time of this writing, the petition had over 268k supporters. The link on Facebook read “Trump’s Sons African Killing Spree.”

The post performed as intended. My initial feeling was sadness for the defenseless carcass in the Trump boys arms. It quickly went to disgust and anger at privileged rich folk that take these expensive big game hunting trips merely to outfit their den with another mounted head trophy. An image was conjured in my head of the wimpy rich kid that gets a brief tutorial on how to use a gun right before the hunt begins and the poor animal that will probably die a torturous death due to his lack of skill.

However, I was somehow not satisfied with this mental image and feeling. Something deep within said to me that the feelings I experienced may be a false quick emotional reaction to the image I saw. So I decided to dig a little bit to find out about the Trump boys and their hunting.

I soon learned that the picture from the Trump boys’ hunt was from 2012 and was originally shared by TMZ. I also found this following article from Forbes.com confirmed to me that my initial reaction was due to not having all the facts: http://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/04/09/tmz-is-wrong-about-donald-trump-jr-and-safari-hunting/#425eb0f13206

I further go on to find other articles that talk about hunting and their positive effects on endangered animal population and ecosystem balance.

Here are some other interesting reads:

http://conservationmagazine.org/2014/01/can-trophy-hunting-reconciled-conservation/

http://www.rmef.org/Conservation/HuntingIsConservation/25ReasonsWhyHuntingIsConservation.aspx

I realize that the lazy natural response we have to internet media, memes and hit-piece stories is to just take the emotion that was prompted at face value and leave it at that. But finding truth, in most situations, involves being willing to dig a little deeper and realize that there is more than meets the eye in a lot of situations.

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