Heard an interesting point about that, which made me think a little.
It's pretty long winded, but the gist of it is that these reserves breed native wild animals and in a lot of cases prevent them from going extinct. The meat is apparently distributed amongst local African communities and the money that such hunters spent on being able to hunt the older animal is put back into these reserves so the cycle can keep going.
So by paying to shoot the lion she, in effect, did a lot of good for international conservation.
That's a very rough and brief explanation.
But got me thinking.
Even so, it was pretty stupid of her to post such a picture so publically...people were always going to react the way they did (I was outraged too)
I understand the necessity of culling the old and injured for the sake of conservation. It stops lions, etc turning towards the slower and easier to catch human food source for din dins for example. This can be done discreetly and sensitively by people who have a connection to the land.
I don't get how having a picture of some gurning redneck straddling the King of the Jungle is going to attract tourists to come along and watch big kitties get their brains blown out. Most people find this either abhorrent or at the least disturbing and would be turned off visiting and spending money in a country/park that supported this. There are many more conservation projects going on that don't involve tooling up some "good ol' gal" from Duke Nukumland to blow away the local wildlife.
Can you imagine getting visiting tourists to strangle to death old/infirm kiwi's over here? You know, pay $50, pull off the birds' head, take some snaps for their blog and then you could serve it up in some restaurant to feed local skinny students and hipster types as they need feeding.
Can you imagine What Gareth would say??
Not directed at you Tegal you know that.