

In South Africa, Ranchers Are Breeding Animals to Be Hunted - spuiszis
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-hunting-mutant-big-game-in-south-africa/

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beloch
I have a great uncle who runs an elk farm. He's often said he wants to breed
albino elk because hunters will pay a fortune to bag one, but he has yet to
get even one. Fortunately, regular elk will do for most. Hunters pay to come
onto his land and shoot elk. He leads them out in a pickup and, depending on
how trustworthy the hunter is, has his sons split off the animal he wants shot
(a hunter with poor aim might unwittingly take out a mating bull or pregnant
cow, thereby multiplying the cost by a factor of two or _much_ more).
"Hunters" tend to get upset if they're suddenly on the hook for a much larger
bill than initially agreed upon.

Some of the customers paying to shoot elk are just frustrated hunters. They've
been out hunting and simply had no luck, but didn't want to go home empty
handed. For them, my uncle's farm is the backup plan. Some customers like the
taste of elk and want it out of season (wild elk can be legally hunted for
only a few months per year). However, there are also those who just want to
shoot a big game animal but entirely lack the expertise to hunt.

Meat and velvet (antlers) are still bigger sources of income, but hunters make
an impressive contribution to my uncle's revenues. My uncle started his farm
in the eighties when farming elk was virtually unheard of but, even today,
when Elk farms are much more common and Elk meat is on a lot of restaurant
menus, Elk are still viewed as wild animals. This is not entirely inaccurate.
Even the "tame" elk on my uncle's farm are quite vicious to anything shorter
than them. Short hunters are advised to stay in the truck at all times!

If you want to spot an elk farm, the give-away is the 8-foot (minimum) and
sturdily built fence that surrounds them. Elk are excellent jumpers and bulls
have the mass of a bovine cow. Imagine a cow that can clear a six foot fence,
and you have an idea of what elk are like.

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wil421
Interesting story, I get Elk antlers for my dogs to chew on and they are
pretty expensive for even a small piece. It has always made me wonder how
profitable it is for people who sell Elk antlers and other types of animal
antlers. Although I doubt you can really scale up antler production very
easily.

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jdhawk
You're probably buying cut and sanded sheds - which are found in heavy elk
populated areas in the spring.

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wtbob
I think it all comes down to this:

> Hunting ranches have been widely credited with saving the rhinoceros from
> extinction in the 1960s, when there were just an estimated 575,000 large
> wild animals in the country.

Megafauna compete human beings: they eat us, or they eat our food, or they
displace our food. We're really, _really_ good at competing.

Fortunately, private property rights give an incentive for people to protect &
foster animals they would otherwise have an incentive to kill. No sane person
would want to live within range of a lion—unless he derived some benefit from
it. That's precisely what these operations do: they have every reason to
preserve the species they are each interested in (yes, even the non-mutants,
because they provide breeding stock).

Now, I don't particularly get why anyone would want to shoot a more-or-less
captive animal: for me and every other huntsman I know, the fun really is in
the pursuit, in trying to match the animals' advantages with our own. I could
see paying for a white tiger skin rug (it'd be pretty), but I can't imagine
tromping out some ranch, riding out in a truck and shooting it myself. What'd
be the point? I don't go to a cattle ranch and shoot steers; I don't go to a
potato farm and pull potatoes.

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ars
> I don't particularly get why anyone would want to shoot a more-or-less
> captive animal: for me and every other huntsman I know, the fun really is in
> the pursuit

If the land area was large enough you could have the best of both.

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wtbob
Yeah, but the animal wouldn't really be wild, so it wouldn't really be the
same experience. Everybody's different, of course.

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poulsbohemian
This happens in lots of places. Around the Rocky Mountains there are elk
breeders and huge ranches for the same purpose. Depending on the size of the
bull (or specifically his rack) the price can reach tens of thousands of
dollars.

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ars
This is excellent!

If they can switch everyone to this instead of poaching it would be huge
positive for those animals.

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EdwardDiego
It would help if social media didn't erupt into massive storms of outrage
every time someone took a photo of themselves with a dead lion that they shot
on a safari ranch.

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ars
They need to give it a PR spin like "sustainably shot" or something like that.

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lotsofmangos
Hunting mutant animals bred for the purpose over generations sounds a lot like
most commercial pheasant shooting.

[http://www.heartofenglandfarms.com/gamestock/breeds/](http://www.heartofenglandfarms.com/gamestock/breeds/)

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Dewie
> mutant animals

How about we de-sensationalize this to _selective breeding_.

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dang
Ok, we took out "mutant".

