Andrew,

Thanks for posting the letter and my comments below are directed to the letter and not to you for posting it.

I have to say I think the letter is a load of self serving bollocks and not suprisingly written in an attempt to protect their own interests and nothing more. To suggest a ban on canned Lion hunting would endanger the SA hunting industry as a whole is utterly ridiculous. All it would do is put the Lion breeders out of business and nothing more. -Which IMO is a very good thing and the sooner it happens, the better.

To suggest the ban would put more pressure on wild Lions, is (IMO) equally ridiculous. I doubt there's a single country in Africa that allows Lions to be shot without a quota system of some kind in place and if there were such countries, I'm sure CITES and/or other organisations would take steps to correct the situaton. (An example of how this happens is the USF&WS and Mozambique Elephants) Tanzania for example, allows a quota of 4 Lions per block per year. Banning Lion breeding and canned Lion hunting in SA won't affect the Lion population in Tanzania at all.

For them to suggest that SCI supports captive breeding of Lions is also untrue and in fact SCI don't allow SA Lions to be entered into their record books. I'm not a fan of SCI at all, but for once I take my hat off to them for their decision.

I notice that at the start of the letter it's suggested that captive Lion breeding helps the wild population and later on says that captive Lion breeding has absolutely no effect on wild Lion populations. - How's that for a stunning piece of logic!

They also raise the point of various diseases in the parks and suggest their Lions migh help in some way. It's been proved that the current populations in the parks are slowly developing an immunity to those diseases and in fact I personally saw an example of that just last week........ how I wonder, can Lions that don't have that immunity help the wild population that do have such immunity?

Permitting Lion breeding and canned hunting to continue, will eventually get all of us hunters tarred with the same brush by the antis and one day they'll use it as a weapon to get all hunting, everywhere, banned. Make no mistake about it at all, if we hunters don't police our actions and our ethics ourselves, one day, someone else will come along and do it for us......... and they won't be pro hunting.