
Originally Posted by
JasperL
Those are apples and oranges. The first mistake is conflating domesticated animals raised for food with wild elephants hunted for sport.
If you your children were killed rounding up Grizzly bears, that's roughly equivalent. Or perhaps if the kids were in the field shooting the cows with arrows, and a wounded cow turned and charged them. Bull fighting is also a decent analogy - that's an actual fight to the death, and no, I won't shed many tears for the losing bull fighters, rare as them dying in the ring may be.
FWIW, as I've said, I don't have a problem with trophy hunting. I don't understand the appeal, but I do recognize that something like a wild bull elephant has a HUGE value, and those folks struggling to survive can either sell them (effectively) to wealthy trophy hunters who do get a thrill out of it, and maintain a viable population to serve that market, or they'll allow them to be poached, or kill the animals themselves for the tusks and let the carcass rot, etc. So in a lot of ways, it's a matter of how they'll be killed not whether, and by far the best method is controlled, licensed hunters paying big bucks for the privilege. It's sort of odd that we can save a population of rare animals by hunting/killing SOME of them, but that's how it works..... But when a hunter taking on these creatures, accepting the risks, gets killed, sorry but I don't mourn the loss like I would some kid trampled by a wild elephant on her way back from school.