John,

Concerning your response about the conservation being a by-product; I agree with you 100%.

Your point about the word "crime" is well taken but I would like to explain my use of the term. When it comes to ethics, what one man considers to be OK another may take offense to. Ethics are subjective and it is futile to try and hold others to your own standards. But this issue goes beyond ethics and here is why.

In countries where "wild Lions" live such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique, shooting from the back of a truck is illegal. In South Africa, it is not. I really don't know about Namibia as I haven't hunted there. But I've been around SA Lions and "wild Lions" enough to know that the only way one ends up close to one in a vehicle as in the Paradox thread clip, is in a park or on one of the South African Game Farm operations where canned Lion shooting takes place. Lets consider the following:

1) Hunting inside a park is illegal, so if this clip was taken in a park, the shooting of the cat was illegal. This I do not believe to be the case in this video.

2) If this clip was not taken in South Africa and not in a park, and was a "wild Lion", the shooting of the cat from the back of the truck was illegal.

3) Now here is the kicker to this argument. In South Africa, although it is legal to shoot plains game from the back of a vehicle, the shooting of large predators is controlled by TOPS legislation which strictly forbids the shooting of captive bred lions from the back of a vehicle. The regulation states that captive bred lion hunts MUST be conducted on foot once an adequate track as been established.

So in fact, we are not merely speaking about the ethics of this clip. I am unaware of any regulation in any African country that allows the legal shooting of a Lioness from the protection of the back of a truck. THIS IS THE VERY REASON THE STATEMENT "AS YOU CAN SEE, WE HAD TO SHOOT" WAS INSERTED INTO THE VIDEO CLIP. Without this statement which implies self defense, this video documents an illegal act being committed.

This is the reason this episode "disturbs me" as Gatsby puts it. I just can't get past the fact that hunters of the experience level generally found on this forum are more interested in what type of weapon was used in the video than what actually happened in the video.