Issue: Trophy hunting and conservation

Recently there was an online beauty contest hosted to vote for the "hot hunters" with photos of big game mammals being killed by them. There are many people online get irritated by such activity but there are also supporters for hunting right of these teenagers, who claims hunting benefits conservation.

Some researchers have also argued that sport hunting can support wildlife conservation policies and local development by providing huge amounts of revenue, and it can ensure ecological conservation through the enforcement of strict hunting rules (Lindsey et al., 2007).

Trophy hunting involves low off-takes is sustainable if the site itself is well-managed. Lindsey et al., （2006） summarized the benefits as follows: 

1. Trophy hunters pay higher fees per client and more revenue are shared by local people (Lewis and Alpert, 1997)；

2. Trophy hunting creates financial incentives for wildlife and habitat protection under a diversity of scenarios, especially for areas where wildlife is the primary land use； 

3. The provision of revenues from trophy hunting has the potential to promote broad acceptance of conservation objectives；

4. The presence of trophy hunting operators can reduce illegal hunting, where operators often conduct anti-poaching to protect the wildlife resource on which they depend (Hurt and Ravn, 2000).

The right-or-wrong debate of hunting on conservation is tricky. The Cove is a documentary that won Oscar Best Documentary Award, it illustrates a story of a group of people, from all occupations, work together to prevent dolphins to be killed by local villagers. After watching the film, I still feel the strong conflicts between local villagers and the rescue team. There are a few aspects that worth discussing. First, local culture. Dolphin killing is argued to be an important way for local indigenous people to make revenue and conserve their culture tradition. Second, economic trade-off. The environmental impact of revenue per capita caused by hunting is much larger than revenue per capita imposed by agriculture and industry. Third, food source. Dolphin is an important protein source for local people. There is a ethical paradox for more developed nationals to impose their values on the less developed areas. African countries might be a better example than Japan regarding to have right to protect such protein source from collection and hunting.