Notice the weasly wording of the scumbag’s promise to cooperate:
And now he is evidently making sure that it’s not possible to contact him. Why do you suppose that is, @Bay ? And why do you suppose he doesn’t call them? He certainly has their number.
Here we go, @bclintonk. Big Five.
[Lion-killing dentist goes to ground as US investigators step up their search](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11490263)
You need to keep up, LasMa, Read post #272.
“people are so stupid sensitive today about all sorts of things”
@awcntbd Guilty as charged. You can count me as one of the people who is stupid sensitive about all sorts of things, such as the protection of wildlife, the care and treatment of refugees, depletion of natural resources, the rising oceans, equality in treatment by the police, and any number of other ridiculously stupid things.
To me, this sounds pretty incriminating in itself. Even if, as Palmer claims, he thought his guide and/or the landowner had a permit to legally kill a lion on private land, he surely can’t have thought it was legally permissible to go into the national park, where it’s unlawful to hunt lions, for the purpose of baiting and thereby inducing a lion to come out onto private land where it would be lawful to kill it. To my mind, that’s “hunting” in the national park, even if the kill takes place outside the park boundaries. I have no doubt our National Park Service would see it that way, too, if some yahoo hunter tried the same trick with wildlife in a U.S. national park. With only a handful of exceptions, we don’t allow hunting in our national parks. Although many of our national parks were established for their scenic beauty rather than for wildlife protection per se, the no-hunting rule makes some of them quite important wildlife sanctuaries. We’ve had lawful wolf hunting in Minnesota under a strict permit/quota/lottery system off-and-on since the western Great Lakes population was removed from Endangered Species Act protection. Currently there’s no wolf hunting due to a federal district court ruling, but that could be overturned on appeal. Suppose, though, that wolf hunting was legal in Minnesota, and a hunter with a wolf permit entered Voyageurs National Park, where hunting of any kind is prohibited, and set out bait to lure a wolf (or more likely a pack of wolves, since they rarely travel solo) outside the park boundaries where he could ambush and kill one. Is there any question that if the Park Service found out about it, they’d charge the hunter with unlawfully hunting in the park? I don’t think so. The biggest challenge in hunting is often not the kill, but finding and pursuing the prey and getting yourself in position to take the shot. If you’re doing the finding and pursuing (in this case, “pursuing” by making the prey come to you, via baiting) inside the national park, you’re actually hunting inside the national park. And that’s unlawful in most U.S. national parks, and I very much doubt the rule would be different in Zimbabwe. So if Palmer’s guide is telling the truth about Palmer entering the park along with the guide to locate and bait the lion, then Palmer knowingly engaged in unlawful hunting in the national park, and that would have made the hunt an illegal hunt and the kill an illegal kill even if the guide and/or landowner had a legal permit for a lion kill, as Palmer claims he believed was the case.
Why not be informed sensitive, rather than stupid sensitive. I think that is the point that was being made, but I don’t speak for the writer.
Bay, I’m working and defending lions at the same time.
You need to keep up. Or perhaps you’re intentionally ignoring my question to you in #280?
What part of your question is not answered by my referral to post # 272?
@Bay The writer was speaking in reference to his “enjoyable gas-guzzling hobbies on the ground at 200+ mph and in the air at 510 knots.” I have a hunch that all the information in the world about the well-documented harm caused by the burning of fossil fuels will not make one bit a difference when it comes to the enjoyment of his hobby. Just as Dr. Palmer didn’t let anything so “stupid” as the protection of wildlife interfere with his enjoyment of hunting.
Ok, but you called yourself stupid sensitive.
Sigh.
@bclintonk, I want to thank you for your thoughtful, thorough and knowledgeable posts. Wildlife conservation and hunting for sport are clearly emotionally charged issues for many of us. I am honestly surprised that this still goes on - I guess I shouldn’t be. I hope as a community we can learn to value what we have before there’s nothing left to value.
@Bay Please accept my apologies for being unclear. I’ll try it a different way.
When someone says (post # 266), “I oft avoid mentioning my enjoyable gas-guzzling hobbies on the ground at 200+ mph and in the air at 510 knots . . . Why? Because people are so stupid sensitive today about all sorts of things,” he is NOT saying that he is frustrated because many people are uninformed.
He does not want to have an informed conversation. He wants no conversation at all. He is saying he wants to enjoy his hobby in peace, free of any criticism. He is saying that he wants to discuss it with people who share his views, and who absolutely do not care one bit about how much he personally is doing to degrade the environment.
So, yeah, to repeat, I’m stupid sensitive in his eyes.
Got it. I do think most people are stupid sensitive about what goes on in Africa regarding big game hunting. I think he is right in that regard. People are very egocentric about animals and their own resources, and do not recognize that people around the world view things and animals differently than we do, and their needs and economies are different from ours, so they need to make different choices than we might, to obtain the best outcome they can, with what they have.
But what can possibly be justifiable about 3 guys dragging bait behind a truck, putting an arrow into a lion, and following him around for forty hours while he is in pain, and then chopping his head off? Are we “stupid sensitive” because we recoil at that on a fundamental level, even though “people around the world view things and animals differently than we do?”
I was raised by hunters and live among rural folks who hunt for food. I’ve been taught letting an animal suffer unnecessarily is inexcusable.
Its fine to recoil from it (I do too), but that is different from refusing to understand why it goes on, or the actual details of how it is carried out (with older bred animals, whose body parts are used for other purposes), and judging the people who do it as worthy of being put to death. You don’t have to do it, and will never be forced to do it. But because other people do, it might be the reason lions will continue to roam our Earth.
@emilybee, your friends won’t be criticized for being American. From what I’ve seen on my four trips over there, the majority of tourists are American (I even met a guy who was born in the same hospital I was!). They need our business too badly to disparage our country.
“The Big Five” is a term used to describe the most dangerous animals in Africa. It’s not really accurate, though, because hippos are extremely dangerous (they run very fast). It’s a big deal among tourists to see all five in one visit. The region we were in, we typically saw all five on every drive! The Sabi Sands Preserve is supposed to have the highest density of leopards in the world. Kruger National Park doesn’t have as many.
Well apparently Zimbabwe does not feel that way and doesn’t view things too much differently than we do in relation to the killing of this animal. Their Environment Minister had this to say today:
Yes, because that lion was not permitted to be hunted. Her objection was not to hunting lions in general.