WaPo has a report on another hunter bagging a rare creature:
The photograph, published last week in Pakistani newspapers, was stunning. It showed a magnificent mountain goat, with huge, symmetrically spiral horns, nestled on a rock and surrounded by breathtaking snowy mountains, with a man kneeling and smiling behind it.
It took a few seconds to realize that the animal, a wild Astore markhor, was dead. The caption described the man as an American hunter who had paid a record $110,000 to shoot it on a tourist expedition to Pakistan’s northern Himalayan region of Gilgit-Baltistan.
Outraged? Here’s the defense:
Lovely horns.
But there is another, more benign, rationale behind allowing Harlan, along with two other Americans, to pay enormous sums to kill three long-horned markhors in northern Pakistan in the past month. According to Pakistani officials and conservation groups, the practice has actually helped save a rare and endangered species from potential extinction.
How about this: you pays your $110,000, and when one of these impressive animals dies of natural causes, you can have the head. Or the entire body.
Or maybe you can hunt them, but you can only shoot one that would never reproduce again. Although making that work seems a bit difficult. Not to mention the utility of animals lying exclusively in their gonads is an unwarranted assumption. I don’t know for markhors, but among elephants the leadership of the matriarchs is an important element in their long-term survival strategy.
