Quote Originally Posted by cmoney View Post
In many cases, game hunting is the lesser of the two evils. They rarely issue game tags to hunt endangered animals (lions are far from endangered) and they only issue a limited number of them. This is why it costs 10s of thousands to get them. The governments of these countries rely on the money Westerners pay for the tags to maintain healthy populations and to insure the animals dont go extinct. Many times a specific animal will even be targeted in game hunting. For example, a problematic male who is killing all the cubs or whatever.

I wish people in this country would get as emotional about ISIS strapping bombs to babies to teach explosive classes as they do about the killing of a cat. A cat that would have no issue killing them if it was hungry enough.
There's like 30,000 of them left. There's roughly that many humans with $300 million or more networth. They're spread around and lack genetic diversity. There's a decent chance they go extinct in our lifetime. We'll probably be around to see lots of cool animals cease to exist, as rhinos, tigers, elephants, and blue whales are just a handful of the species on death's doorstep.