Rough Draft of research paper

Patrick Murray 

12/10/12

English 191: Rhetorical and Analytical Writing

Specht-Jarvis

No matter where you live in the world hunting is a vital part of the ecological balance of humans, animals, and plants. Hunting no doubtably has a huge impact on animals and in turn plants, which then affects humans, with this in mind one has to ask does hunting have a positive affect on the planet or is it harmful? In the United States of America there is hunting in practically every state, however it is very closely controlled by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), this government organization sets laws for hunting, bag limits, maintains habitat for the animals and other various things that affect the environment and animals. The DNR has done very well at keeping the balance of animal population in the US but in a continent like Africa where there are many independent countries close together regulating something like hunting is going to be much more difficult because certain species might live or migrate over large areas of land that include multiple countries.  

Humans have been hunting since the beginning of their existence so why is it that in more recent years that the population of certain species has become threatened? Is it from climate change? Maybe its a result population growth or could it be from hunting? Perhaps its all of them. In Africa there is what many call the “big five”, these are five animals that people consider the most impressive animals to kill, it includes the African Elephant, Lion, Cape Buffalo, Black Rhinoceros, and the Leopard. People have been hunting them for a very long time, some for trophies, some for the thrill, and many for food. The Elephant is the largest dry land mammal in the world and attracts a lot of attention when it comes to hunting, the rest of the big five are very dangerous animals and thus the there is a thrill to hunt them. It is not right to kill an animal for a thrill and leave its carcass to rot, many have done this in the past and continue to do it, in Theodore Roosevelt’s book “African Game Trails” he talks about times he himself and his friends went to Africa to hunt the “big five”, for the most part they went to hunt for thrill but he says on page 85 “The two Hills, Clifford and Harold, were running an ostrich farm. The lions sometimes killed their ostriches and stock; and the Hills in return had killed several lions.” like in the early settlement of North America animals such as wolves and mountain lions would kill peoples live stock so they would often kill those animals so they would not kill their live stock anymore, but in modern day this is rarely the case, the “big five” have been extensively hunted, so much so that the black rhinoceros is an endangered animal and the rest of the big five could easily become the same if people do not learn how to hunt responsibly. In the state of Minnesota the wolf has been illegal to hunt for many years because it was on the endangered species list but this past year the DNR decided it was okay to hunt again. Hunting is important to the balance of population, wolves have no natural predator so the population had gotten to a point where it could start harming the wolves. The white tail deer is the main food source for wolves and when there are too many they eat so many deer that they start to starve, how ever people also hunt deer for food, this is where regulations come in, there must be balance of deer and their predators. 

The population of the white tail deer has been closely monitored and the DNR allows people to bag a certain number of deer based on the population of that area with consideration of the wolves. When the deer population gets to high it leads to diseases like Chronic Wasting Disease so for the general welfare of the deer the DNR allows limited hunted reduce the population, this is the same idea behind the wolf hunting. The population of the big five rarely if not ever gets to be too high, so hunting them has become a problem, so many countries in Africa have been putting laws into place to maintain the number of animals killed. The black rhinoceros is illegal to hunt with no exceptions, the trading, selling, and buying of elephant tusks has been banned in hopes of deterring people from killing sensuously. 

The US does not allow importation of any of the big five or part of them to help reduce the desire to hunt the animals, however many Americans still hunt them despite these laws, some spending upward $30,000 just for the hunt. Some laws in place restrict the types of guns people can bring into the countries because it can make it easier to kill the animals, also there are many fees for citizens and non-citizens to hunt in Africa, all these laws are to make it more difficult to hunt the animals help their populations stay higher. 

Poaching has been a huge problem in Africa in part because there have not been many laws regarding the animals for very long but even with those laws people continue to poach because the see money to be made and do not care about the implications of a species going extinct. The International Fund for Wildlife Welfare estimates that 35,000-38,000 African elephants were poached last year in Kenya which is about 10% of the population in that region, with poaching like this the elephants existence is threatened, legalized hunting allows agencies to  monitor and control the population of the animals and the fees for licenses help fund the countries in ways they can fight poaching. International trafficking agencies confiscated about 25 tons of ivory which they estimate to have come from 2,500 elephants.