In South Africa, Ranchers Are Breeding Animals to Be Hunted

I have a great uncle who runs an elk farm. He's often said he wants to breed albino elk because hunters will pay a fortune to bag one, but he has yet to get even one. Fortunately, regular elk will do for most. Hunters pay to come onto his land and shoot elk. He leads them out in a pickup and, depending on how trustworthy the hunter is, has his sons split off the animal he wants shot (a hunter with poor aim might unwittingly take out a mating bull or pregnant cow, thereby multiplying the cost by a factor of two or much more). "Hunters" tend to get upset if they're suddenly on the hook for a much larger bill than initially agreed upon.

Some of the customers paying to shoot elk are just frustrated hunters. They've been out hunting and simply had no luck, but didn't want to go home empty handed. For them, my uncle's farm is the backup plan. Some customers like the taste of elk and want it out of season (wild elk can be legally hunted for only a few months per year). However, there are also those who just want to shoot a big game animal but entirely lack the expertise to hunt.

Meat and velvet (antlers) are still bigger sources of income, but hunters make an impressive contribution to my uncle's revenues. My uncle started his farm in the eighties when farming elk was virtually unheard of but, even today, when Elk farms are much more common and Elk meat is on a lot of restaurant menus, Elk are still viewed as wild animals. This is not entirely inaccurate. Even the "tame" elk on my uncle's farm are quite vicious to anything shorter than them. Short hunters are advised to stay in the truck at all times!

If you want to spot an elk farm, the give-away is the 8-foot (minimum) and sturdily built fence that surrounds them. Elk are excellent jumpers and bulls have the mass of a bovine cow. Imagine a cow that can clear a six foot fence, and you have an idea of what elk are like.

I think it all comes down to this:

> Hunting ranches have been widely credited with saving the rhinoceros from extinction in the 1960s, when there were just an estimated 575,000 large wild animals in the country.

Megafauna compete human beings: they eat us, or they eat our food, or they displace our food. We're really, really good at competing.

Fortunately, private property rights give an incentive for people to protect & foster animals they would otherwise have an incentive to kill. No sane person would want to live within range of a lion—unless he derived some benefit from it. That's precisely what these operations do: they have every reason to preserve the species they are each interested in (yes, even the non-mutants, because they provide breeding stock).

Now, I don't particularly get why anyone would want to shoot a more-or-less captive animal: for me and every other huntsman I know, the fun really is in the pursuit, in trying to match the animals' advantages with our own. I could see paying for a white tiger skin rug (it'd be pretty), but I can't imagine tromping out some ranch, riding out in a truck and shooting it myself. What'd be the point? I don't go to a cattle ranch and shoot steers; I don't go to a potato farm and pull potatoes.

This happens in lots of places. Around the Rocky Mountains there are elk breeders and huge ranches for the same purpose. Depending on the size of the bull (or specifically his rack) the price can reach tens of thousands of dollars.

This is excellent!

If they can switch everyone to this instead of poaching it would be huge positive for those animals.

Hunting mutant animals bred for the purpose over generations sounds a lot like most commercial pheasant shooting.

http://www.heartofenglandfarms.com/gamestock/breeds/

> mutant animals

How about we de-sensationalize this to selective breeding.