Trophy Lion Hunts in America in Same Vile Category as African Hunts

When Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer shot a male African lion — whom researchers had named Cecil — after luring him out of Hwange National park in Zimbabwe, there was a worldwide furor.

Within weeks, nearly all major airlines servicing Africa announced they would stop shipping trophies from the “Africa Big Five” — lions, leopards, African elephants, rhinos, and Cape Buffalo — to far-off worldwide destinations, including America.

There was nearly unanimous public condemnation of trophy hunting in African by non-nationals, with most people in the United States and throughout the world rejecting the idea that the large fees that trophy hunters pay to slay wildlife really do anything consequential to advance conservation. What’s more, even if trophy hunting dropped a few dollars into wildlife monitoring programs, it would not overcome the moral wrong of killing these majestic beasts as a head-hunting gambit.

When we turn to America, there’s no pretense whatsoever of any mountain-lion-hunting dollars spilling over to conservation. In Colorado, for instance, the 2,500 lion hunting licenses sold annually in the state yield about $400,000. The costs of maintaining a single staffer of planning and then collecting information related to lion hunting exceed that sum. It’s considered a “dis-economic” program, with its costs exceeding its revenues.

Putting aside the upside-down economics, there is also the immorality of it. If it’s wrong to shoot lions in Zimbabwe, it’s wrong to shoot them in Colorado.

The images are eerily similar — gloating men standing astride bloodied, lifeless lions who died to feed an ego trip of people with more money than they know how to responsibly spend.

Colorado is a destination for lion trophy hunters throughout the United States, given its wide-open public lands and a state agency that allows a twelve-on-one assault on lions. It’s the fee-paying trophy hunter, three hunting guides who drive the forest roads and look for tracks, and then the eight dogs that they release once they see a track.

Even more so than the lopsided lion hunts in Africa, the American hunts are rigged. Here, they use dogs with GPS collars to do all the “hunting.” The guy who flies in from New York or Michigan is walked to the base of the tree to shoot a terrified lion who has no way to escape.

And that’s one reason why there are more wild lions shot in Colorado every year than there are African lions shot for trophies across all 20 of the African nations with lions. Shooting 500-plus mountain lions in Colorado during a four-month season — including hundreds of mother cats with dependent kittens — is a disgrace.

And it’s set to start all over again three weeks from now — unless Colorado voters approve Prop 127 on Tuesday.

Opponents Spending Millions and Trying to Deceive Voters

On Tuesday, our campaign in Colorado — YES on Prop 127 — culminates with the final votes being cast or delivered at polling stations throughout the state.

Thanks to you, we’ve done an impressive job at raising money to execute our campaign.

But our opponents, in this phase of the campaign, have raised more. Why? Because millionaire and billionaire trophy hunters, like Paul Tudor Jones, have financed their deceptive, reckless campaign.

Where our political committee has hundreds and hundreds of donors, they have dozens.

Their funders are, almost exclusively, people and groups who participate in, or profit from, the practice of terrorizing animals, killing them, and delivering their lifeless bodies to a taxidermist.

They pay no mind that the animals have lives and families who matter to them. And they pay no heed to the incredible array of ecological and economic services that the animals bring to Colorado, including acting as a bulwark against further spread of deadly Chronic Wasting Disease to beleaguered deer and elk in the state.

The campaign against Prop 127 is grounded on deception — it’s a series of lies and misdirections. Concocting a photo of a lion lunging at a child. Telling voters that trophy hunting is banned. Claiming that lions are destroying mule deer, even though these species have co-existed in the same ecosystems for millions of years.

They claim to “support professional wildlife management,” but they are really “anything goes” operators who engage in the most ruthless extreme forms of trophy hunting.  The absence of any limits on killing bobcats for their fur and for trophies only underscores the point.

The opponents’ argument to “trust the experts at Colorado Parks and Wildlife” is not really an argument at all, because what’s behind the CPW curtain is one staffer with a master’s degree in wildlife management with no budget for lions, setting uncertain limits on killing with unknown population levels.

The people who decided to authorize trophy hunting of lions in the first place are state lawmakers who took that action many years ago. And today’s regulation-setters are are members of the Colorado Wildlife Commission, who are political appointees. (The only professional wildlife scientist on the Commission came out strongly in favor of Prop 127 and said that the existing hunting scheme, so commercialized, violates fair chase hunting principles and the norms of the North American Model of Wildlife Management.)

The NRA, the trophy hunters at the Safari Club International, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (a trade association for gun and ammo makers), the Fur Takers of America, and others like them have donated millions of dollars to the opposition campaign and are hiding behind the curtain of CPW’s very flimsy efforts to manage the lion trophy hunt.

What’s more, the top donor to the No on 127 campaign is a shadowy Washington D.C.-based SuperPAC called Building America’s Future. It gave $870,937 in recent days to the No on 127 campaign. Again, not a person on staff has any background in wildlife science.

The second biggest donor is the Concord Fund, which also has not a single person focused on wildlife conservation, wildlife management, or animal welfare. Whatever you may think of the Concord Fund’s goal of placing conservative lawyers on the federal bench, that mission has not a thing to do with wildlife conservation. It’s clear to me that a globe-trotting trophy hunter used the Concord Fund as a pass-through to shield his identity so people wouldn’t know what he does with his money.

Yes on 127 Overwhelms Opponents with Arguments Grounded on Ethics and Science

We’ve conducted a hard-hitting campaign that shows the cruelty built into trophy hunting and commercial trapping. “Treed” shows Colorado voters what’s truly at stake — taking us to the front row of a guided trophy hunt of a lion.

Former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe, himself a hunter, called trophy hunting “unsporting, cruel” in the advertisement he’s featured in.

And Colonel Tom Pool, DVM, MPH, and the former leader of the U.S. Army Veterinary Command, tells Coloradans they need every mountain lion in the state to help arrest the further progression of incurable Chronic Wasting Disease, which is viewed as an existential threat to deer and elk populations in the coming decades.

Dr. Jim Keen, an infectious disease specialist and a career USDA scientist, wrote a definitive report on the role that lions play in curbing CWD. You can read it here.

These veterinary experts point to the value that lions bring to ecosystems, in sharp contrast to the opponents who try to stir fear about these “dangerous” animals.

If Colorado voters could register their disapproval of American trophy hunters killing African lions in Zimbabwe or Tanzania or South Africa, they would do so in droves. There’s little difference in shooting our American lions in Colorado. The African lions only recently secured threatened and endangered status, and preceding that federal action, Americans had no appetite for these trophy-killing expeditions.

When you factor in the use of dogs and GPS equipment, it makes the American brand of trophy hunting even more repulsive. And with the American hunts stripped of the “pay-to-slay” features of the African hunt, there’s no doubt that the American version is bereft of any conservation value.

It’s the right thing to pass Prop 127 and to see that policy expands beyond California and Colorado and spreads across the West. The era of trophy hunting of lions and other native cats must come to a close.