Craig Boddington appeared on yesterday’s edition of Fox & Friends with Tucker Carlson defending 19-year-old Kendall Jones. The rich-kid Texas Tech University cheerleader’s hunting expedition photos caused a firestorm of criticism. Boddington said that Jones’ killing of lions, elephants, and leopards was okay because they were “nuisance animals.”
Not only did Boddington, an author and professional hunter, claim that what Jones was doing was fine because the animals, as he says, were a nuisance, but both Boddington and Jones both say that hunting the rare animals was a conservation effort too.
“In Africa and elsewhere in the Third World, hunting revenues from visiting sportsmen and women are really critical to managing wildlife,” said Boddington. “The direct revenues from hunting and the local employment that safaris bring to town are really important in turning what otherwise might be dangerous animals into a valuable resource.”
Jones also took to the internet to plead her case, invoking President Theodore Roosevelt as justification for her carnage.
“[Roosevelt] was a hunter too, right? He killed the same species that hunters now chase today under a mound of anti-hunting pressure.”
The problem with that argument is that the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, and even Ernest Hemingway, belonged to completely different eras. They hunted during a time when exotic animal populations weren’t walking the line between existence and extinction. But the world is different now: industrialized hunting and poaching have threatened hundreds of animal species all over the world.
Also, men like Roosevelt and Hemingway possessed a reverence and respect for nature and animals. However, modern, wealthy safari hunters just view African safaris as an expensive playground to kill big things with big guns.
Nowadays, the hunt isn’t about mankind attempting to attune itself to nature or protecting it; it’s now about conquering and destroying it because apparently anything interrupting human’s interest is a nuisance.
Josh is a writer and researcher with Ring of Fire. Follow him on Twitter @dnJdeli.
