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Saturday, August 01, 2015

Wondering Where the Lions Are

While the spontaneous outrage over the senseless murder of a magnificent, endangered animal is heartening, it's not enough to even scratch the surface. Some 600 lions (out of about 30,000 total, so 2%)are killed by hunters every year; some two-thirds of those hunters are American. Finally the US Fish and Wildlife Service, after declining the opportunity last year, is looking into reclassifying lions from "threatened" to "endangered" status. This would ban the importation of "trophies" and other such totems for over-compensating douchebags with too much money and not enough penis.

Fuck Walter Palmer, right in the fucking eye socket with a rusty corkscrew. I respect hunters who stock their freezers for the winter, and work with wildlife ecosystems. There is a legitimate role for deer and duck hunters. But I have no respect for rich cocksuckers who just enjoy killing shit. So I'm sincerely joyful that, at least for the time being, Palmer's practice and life appear to be ruined. He's a liar and a poacher and a piece of shit. He spends more money than most hard-working people earn in a goddamned year for the cheap thrill of killing an increasingly scarce animal. Seems like Viagra or enlargement surgery would be more cost-effective.

It's been impressive to see how quickly the popular tide was turned against the currently pre-eminent symbol of division and hate, the confederate flag. The only thing good about that flag is that it comes in two-ply. If I wasn't such a lazy bastard I'd get a full-sized flag, make a video of myself taking a massive, steaming, soupy, vodka-and-beef-jerky dump on it, then wiping my ass with it, and driving to some "sacred" traitor loser monument and leaving it on Nathan Bedford Fucking Forrest Gump's bronzed fool head.

Fuck that flag and everything it stands for. But what it took for the tide to take a righteous turn was a tragic catalyzing event. Since that event and the righteous shitstorm, there has been some pushback, but mostly of the useless-white-noise ('scuse the pun) variety on Facebook. The only ones getting out there on the issue are the lunatic racist fringe, the knuckle-dragging shitbags that even hardcore teabaggers can't defend.

Maybe the same thing can happen here, with trophy hunting. The trophy hunters are bad enough, but they are at least technically legal, so they can be kept track of. Illegal hunters and poachers are worse, lurking in the shadows, waiting opportunistically, uncaring about the destruction they cause. Habitat encroachment is a huge problem as well, but one that could be managed, theoretically.

Most of us wonder from time to time what we might do if somehow awarded with what I would call "walking away" money, the kind of eight- or nine-figure windfall that would enable you to either be like some clichéd Powerball loser, or make a real difference. I shit you not that in such an event, I'd put some serious money toward rounding up a team of mercenaries, real Delta Force / Soldier of Fortune types, and just give them a hefty year's wages to go find every poaching gang or individual within 500 miles of a nature preserve, and skull-fuck the lot of them with Kalashnikovs.

I don't even care if they're poor villagers with families to feed; it is not the role of endangered animals to go extinct in order to support overpopulation of the human virus. That too is the fault of wealthier countries, though, since they pay dearly to either kill the animals or to harvest their parts for trophies or aphrodisiacs. Vicariously it'd be wonderful to hunt those fuckers down as well.

Realistically, I think we're at an impasse. Tigers are already nearly gone -- there are more tigers in Texas than in the rest of the world combined, and that has been the case for some time -- and elephants, lions, and rhinos are not that far behind. The fucking Chinese, who are almost solely responsible for the use of tiger parts, need to start cracking down on their gluttonous idiots, the way they control everything else in their citizens' lives.

I'd happily send my big-money Delta team to the tiger ranches as well, tune up those motherfuckers and their shitbird customers. These are people who add nothing to the world, they just take and kill and destroy. Fuck them. Let them find honest work. Seriously, is every dick broken over there or something, is there that much of a need to send everything into extinction because they can't get a fucking boner?

But China won't crack down on them, won't do anything about any of this. The tigers will be gone soon enough, followed by the other species mentioned, but there will be ever more humans, breeding, greeding, grasping, killing, fucking, sucking their way to oblivion. Most humans do not hate the earth and its wondrous creations, but those that do, that vile minority, do so with impunity, and have scaled their heedless destruction to the point of no return. We do not need an infinite supply of eaters in those already over-supplied areas, we need more of our precious wildlife resources and ecosystems. And we don't need any more assholes who self-actualize by destroying the rare and the beautiful.

The fucking meteor can't hit soon enough.

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