If you care about wild animals, privatise them

30 July 2015 - 02:03 By James Kirkup, ©The Daily Telegraph

The death of Cecil the lion at the hands of an American dentist who paid $50,000 (about R650,000) to shoot him with an arrow is a scandal, an outrage that demonstrates once again our shameful and cruel mismanagement of rare and exotic creatures. But the scandal is not that Cecil was killed. The scandal is the price.The killing has attracted much attention because people feel strongly about big, interesting animals like lions. A lot of those people feel that such animals should not be killed for human entertainment.That is a perfectly respectable position; I have a lot of sympathy with it. If you feel this way, it makes sense to want better policing of wildlife and greater protection of rare animals, measures that make it harder to shoot animals like Cecil. But even the best protection will not change one awkward fact here.That fact is that some people want to kill large animals for fun, and always will. I am not one of them; I can't see why you would kill something you weren't going to eat or that didn't need to be killed for reasons of control.Never mind: some people get off on whacking lions and the like. That appetite creates demand, a demand that the world will always attempt to satisfy.As things stand that demand is satisfied, often clandestinely, by park rangers and others generally paid a pittance to watch over rare animals, who accept bribes from hunters.In other cases those rangers are simply outgunned by commercial poachers, who can earn vast sums bagging rare creatures for others.The bottom line is that our system of managing and protecting large, interesting and shootable animals is not working. Just ask Cecil.No one owned Cecil. That is as it should be: he was a glorious wild animal, running free. But that's also the problem. If no one owns something, how do you determine its value? And if something has no defined value and no owner, what is the incentive to protect and preserve it?Let's imagine Cecil had instead been owned by Lion Corp International, one of those big multinational companies. For Lion Corp Cecil would be a valuable asset, to be protected and yes, disposed of, for the right price. Until and unless that price was realised, his owners would have a clear incentive to care for him, which would mean maintaining his environment and paying professional rangers to watch over him properly.The chances of Lion Corp staff being bribed to lure a valuable lion off company land so he could be shot with an arrow and skinned would be lower than they are under the regime that oversaw Cecil's death.When time came to realise the value of the asset (ie shoot Cecil), the company would do so in a profit-maximising way, perhaps by auction. My guess is that the price for shooting Cecil would be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, reflecting demand, the scarcity of the event, and the high costs of maintaining a lion.Since the shooting would take place openly in the market regulated by the relevant government, it would be done efficiently and humanely. Cecil would die a quick and clean death instead of the slow and squalid demise he suffered in the unregulated black market.Alternatively, some of the many millions of people unhappy at the death of animals like Cecil might outbid the hunters and pay for the beast to stay alive, an option denied to them today.If a profit-seeking company had owned Cecil, he'd probably be around today, since lion lovers would surely be able to muster more cash (perhaps by crowd-funding?) than even the most determined and wealthy hunter.At the end of all this, Lion Corp would turn a profit on the animal's death, or life. Why else would it have gone to all that trouble? Some of that profit would go to the owners of the company, and some would be used to procure and raise more lions, which would yield more profit in future. Some of those lions, after leading happy, healthy, properly managed lives, might then be shot.Cecil the lion was born free. That was why he died so cheaply, and so badly.If you care about wild animals, privatise them...

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