Canned hunting/culling/poaching 

This is under a CW because I understand that it's a sensitive subject. But I am going to be talking about how changes to wildlife management policy have contributed to the rise in poaching and the endangerment of species.
Please don't read further if you're going to try to railroad this into a debate about being vegan. This is about extinction, not what you want to eat.

Canned hunting/culling/poaching 

I'm going to contrast wildlife conservation methods in the 70s with current ones because changes started in the 80s in South Africa - and the boundaries of the big national reserves were set by then (except Kruger, which has become bigger).
Because of the ban on hunting within these game parks, and the fact that humans intervened to ensure, for example, adequate water, animal numbers grew beyond what the land could sustain.

Canned hunting/culling/poaching 

This mostly affected buck (antelope), zebra and other prey. Seldom the predators.
At that time, the parks were almost totally funded by government. They weren't, and weren't expected to, break even financially - much less turn a profit.
The answer to controlling the game populations was culling. Experienced rangers, aided by people from surrounding areas, shot older animals. The meat was distributed free to nearby villages, and trophies sold to tourists.

Canned hunting/culling/poaching 

It's critical to all conservation efforts to work with the surrounding communities. Even before its expansion, the Kruger Park was bigger than Wales. Without local support, it's amost impossible to prevent poaching.

In the 80s, under apartheid, foreign tourism to SA plummeted. About the only Westerners happy to visit were trophy hunters. But the private game farms had little besides buck to offer.

Canned hunting/culling/poaching 

This desire for foreign currency caused a disastrous change in policy. Instead of culling to manage numbers, why not sell the surplus - live - to game farms? It compensated for the loss of tourist revenue to the national reserves, too.

Private game reserves - such as Timbavati and its white lions, at the edge of Kruger - are NOT game farms. I am talking about the ones whose purpose is almost exclusively hunting.

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Canned hunting/culling/poaching 

@OutOnTheMoors What would be your solution?

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