Trophy Hunting Research Paper

“Hunting is about the journey, not the outcome,” an anonymous person said. What this means is that hunters enjoy the process of hunting and the bonding between them and the animal by tracking and watching it and bonding with the other hunters that they are with. The hunters want to care for the animals to help keep them healthy and active and they enjoy seeing the animals even when they are not hunting. Trophy hunting would be the next thrill for advanced hunters, tracking animals for days and waiting for that perfect shot. The dictionary definition of trophy hunting is “The selective hunting of wild game for human recreation.” A lot of people get this confused with poaching which is “The illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals” and do …show more content…
Some people think that trophy hunting would have no effects on poaching. About thirty thousand elephants are killed every year because of poaching and the shrinking habitat for the animals in Africa according to nationalgeographic.com. Poaching happens in Africa for two reasons, first, that people want to sell the ivory collected from elephants and rhinos. The second reason people poach is to feed themselves and their families. With trophy hunting, “The client would take home the head and other desirable parts and the town that the hunter was hunting in or near would get all of the meat” nationalgeographic.com said. This would mean that they do not need to kill animals for more meat because they are already getting it. The nymag.com states that one giraffe would give the same meat of four deer. Also, nationalgeographic.com said again, that one elephant would give about three tons of meat to the African communities whenever trophy hunting occurs. Part of the money received from trophy hunting goes toward providing ground patrols so they could help catch poachers in the act and maybe even before they shoot the animal. Finally, if a poacher wanted to try and make money off of ivory and shoot the animal legally by trophy hunting this would not work. As I said earlier legal rhino tags go for hundreds of thousands of dollars each and not very many can be bought every year. Even with elephants though, the price of ivory is about one thousand five hundred dollars per pound, the average elephant hunt goes for a bit more than the money you would receive for the ivory and you would actually lose