What's the best way to protect wildlife?
- By Zhu Ping
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E-mail China Daily, August 14, 2014
More importantly, authorized hunting can generate funds, which apart from wildlife protection can also be spent on local residents to make them realize that protecting wildlife makes good financial sense. For instance, African countries such as Zimbabwe and Cameron have instituted legal hunting programs that require people to pay huge amounts to hunt some selected, mostly aged animals. Authorized hunting programs generate estimated annual revenue of $200 million for the sub-Saharan region.
Even in Australia, an advanced economy, kangaroo shooting has developed into a big industry despite the animal being a "mascot" of the country. The reason: hunting keeps the kangaroo numbers in control to the benefit of the environment and, at the same time, boosts the economy.
Most people agree that wildlife protection is necessary, but differences crop up when it comes to the methods to be used for the purpose. For example, is it acceptable to release possibly poisonous snakes in a park, as a woman in Qingyuan, Guandong province, has been shown as doing in a series of photographs widely circulated on the Internet on Tuesday? The person who took the photographs in July has said that he recognized some of the snakes to be cobras, prompting local police to start an investigation into the incident.
Something similar, but on larger scale, happened in 2012 when some Beijing tourists set free several thousand snakes in Xinglong county of Hebei province, creating panic among local farmers and forcing them to call a "snake strike".
Recent years have seen many "wildlife activists" take such "set-free" actions. But many of the animals they set free didn't survive because they couldn't adapt to the conditions in the wild. Besides, abrupt of introduction of animals could break the balance of the local ecosystem. Moreover, the more purchase of wild animals to set them free, unfortunately the more poaches for sale.
Therefore, we have to find the most scientific way of protecting wildlife. And until we do that, we have to understand that killing wild animals is not always wrong, and forcing them to live not always right.
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