Gray lines in sport hunting

Our last day in London, mid-way to Namibia, gave us an opportunity to explore the British Museum. We've got some photos posted of the museum on the Picasa site (link to album in upper left corner of blog).

One of the exhibits stimulated me to think a bit about the gray lines in sport hunting. This is a topic that I enjoy struggling through with students in my courses, as we explore the ethics of sport hunting. In the Assyrian exhibit, there is a magnificent room lined with stone reliefs showing a lion hunt of the Assyrian king. They were from a palace in Ninevah, in modern-day northern Iraq, and date from about 600 BC.

As the photos below show, several lions (perhaps up to 15, representing different parts of Assyria) were released from cages. The king used this opportunity to show his power over his people, in symbolic fashion, by killing all of the lions. Actually, he had several archers who wounded the lions, and other men who herded the lions into a corral--after which, the king dispatched the lion (see photo on right).

Professional wildlife biologists struggle with this issue constantly--more than 2500 years after these reliefs were constructed. Several years ago, Nebraska's governor put a lot of pressure on the Game and Parks Commission to increase pheasant populations (a non-native species in Nebraska) by releasing pen-raised birds. Besides the fact that pen-raised birds do not survive very long in the wild (not even long enough to be hunted, really), the ethics of releasing a non-native species into an ecosystem is quite controversial--as you might expect.

As I begin working in Namibia, I'm also fully aware that I will probably find several types of situations where hunts are not really 'hunts' in the full meaning of the word. So, does this matter to the end-goal? Animals are often confined by fences--how large does a fenced area have to be to encourage fair chase? Animals may be purchased and brought to ranches for specific people to hunt. Is that ethical? Is it even ethical for hunting to become a sport that may become limited to upper-class hunters because of high hunt fees? When do the efforts of a couple guys/gals to put up a blind and save its use for their friends turn into an upper-class hunt club? Don't those upper-class folks pay a lot for conservation? When does the "we're paying for conservation" argument fail to be meaningful?

So, an unexpected period of reflection in the British Museum. I'm sure you'll see some thoughts on this throughout future posts.