Tawny Pham

ENG 1A
17 April 2016
(Revised) Outline:
Thesis: The act of trophy hunting and trading should be banned all over the country because it
falls under the definition of animal abuse.
I. Trophy hunters are one of the main examples of animal abusers.
A. The definition of animal cruelty is intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly taking an
action that mistreats or kills any animalsuch as torturing, tormenting, mutilation,
maiming, poisoning, or abandonment (Itkowitz).
B. trophy hunters kill thousands of exotic wild animals, representing hundreds of
different species, in foreign countries, primarily in Africa (IDAUSA).
C. The list of huntable species is usually very long and includes more common
species such as impala, black bears, common zebra, giraffes, an baboons, but also
endangered species (IDAUSA).
D. The list contains the Big Five African species such as lions, elephants, rhinos,
buffalo, and leopards (Bale).
II. The Safari Club International (SCI) promotes trophy hunting throughout the world, including
the U.S, through killing contests.
A. For Americans, canned hunting in South Africawhere lions are bred on ranches to
be shot by hunters within a fenced area is the method trophy hunters commonly use
when hunting (Bale).
B. to win so-called Grand Slam and Inner Circle titles. SCI members take short
cuts in their hurry to beat competitors by killing captive and defenseless animals in
canned hunts, both in the United States and in other countries. Hunters lure animals
to their guns with bait, shoot them from helicopters to vehicles with spotlights, or in
or near national parks (IDAUSA).
III. Americans play a huge role in the practice of trophy hunting and trade.
A. Sport hunters, those who kill animals for recreation rather than out of necessity,
imported more than 1.26 million trophies to the U.S. in the decade from 2005 through
2014, according to the U.S Fish and Wildlife Services import data by Humane
Society International and the Humane Society of United States (Bale).
B. American hunters import more than 126,000 animal trophies a yearor 345 a day
(Bale).

C. Heads, horns, tusks, and other body parts of most of these animals are legally, and
sometimes illegally, imported as trophies to the United States by the hunters
(IDAUSA).

IV. Trophy hunting and trading sets drawbacks to different wildlife in concerns of genetics.
A. The large antlers, horns or tusks that make trophy animals so attractive to hunters
evolved as signals to help females pick mates with the best genes. Trophy hunters
remove these good genes every time they bag an animal (Holmes).
B. This leads to smaller-horned sheep of lower genetic quality in Alberta, Canada and
an increasing number of tuskless elephants in Africa and Asia (Holmes).
V. Trophy hunting and trading negatively impacts the population of lions in Africas wildlife.
A. Male lions are usually hunted by foreigners that specifically travel to Africa for this
reason; targeting male lions contributes to the declining population number of lions as
a whole species because of the social breeding system of the lion (Kiffner).
B. When a male lion is killed, it completely disrupts the whole pride. A new male
comes into the area and takes over the pride, and, of course, first of all kills all the
cubs and possibly some of the females that are defending their cubs (Joubert). Thats
an estimate between 20 [and] 30 lionskilled when one lion is hanging on a wall
somewhere in a far-off place (Joubert).
C. If pride holding males are removed consecutively from their pride [e.g. by trophy
hunting which aims explicitly at large, male individuals], lion population viability is
considerably reduced (Kiffner).
D. Trophy hunters pay a minimum of US$30,000--50,000 for such a safari and thus
often demand to actually shoot a lion. If no suitable lion can be found, it is likely
that a poor specimen (i.e. a young lion) might be better than none (Kiffner).
VI. Cecil the Lion was one of the many lions in Africa killed by American trophy hunters.
A. Walter Palmer, an American dentist from Minnesota, was the one who killed Cecil
the Lion while on a July hunting expedition and wont face charges in the beloved
big cats death, a Zimbabwean minister said the day it was reported (McLaughlin).
B. Cecil lived another 40 hours until the hunters tracked him down and shot him with a
gun He was then skinned and beheaded (McLaughlin).
C. The hunters also tried to destroy the GPS collar that Cecil was wearing as part of a
research project backed by Oxford University (McLaughlin).
D. Brought awareness to the cruelty of trophy hunting.
VII. Others argue trophy hunting can aid Africans with safety.

A. For Africans who lose crops, livestock and even human lives to dangerous species
such as lions, wildlife is often seen as a liability to be avoided or killed rather than an
asset to be protected (Anderson).
B. Non-governmental organizations like the Integrated Rural Development and Nature
Conservation in Namibia have succeeded in protecting African wildlife and the
people who live in it by paying poachers that know the bush very well and that know
wildlife very well to look after wildlife instead of destroying it.
C. The IRDNC has helped men reclaim their abilities to manage their peoples and their
rights to own and manage wildlife. And thus, as people started feeling ownership over
wildlife, wildlife numbers started coming back (Kasaona).
D. Africans get both the opportunity to regulate wildlife destruction to their living
conditions while getting jobs and to, also, save their wildlife from extinction.
VIII. Others also argue that trophy hunting and trading sustains Africas impoverished economy.
A. Across Africa, hunting generates more than $200 million in revenue each year,
mostly in southern Africa, according to a study in Biological Conservation
(Anderson).
B. Trophy hunting is not the only way for Africa to have sufficient money.
C. A huge amount of foreigners travel to Africa on tours that makes 80 billion dollars a
year according to conservationists and National Geographic Explorers in Residence,
Beverly and Dereck Joubert.
D. In a survey conducted by Remington Research on behalf of the HSUS, Two-thirds of
Americans support listing African lions under the Endangered Species Act to give the
species greater federal protections and more than a three-to-one margin, responders
said that if they could travel to Africa, they would prefer to spend their tourism
dollars in a country that prohibits trophy hunting rather than one that allows it
(HSUS).
E. With the killing of African wildlife, its apparent that tourism in Africa would slowly
decline, negatively affecting the economy that Africans survive on.