On Safari: good to go

Many months of preparation have brought us to the last days in the run up to our flights on the 18th of August. While I'm having trouble sleeping tonight, one week from now there won't be a chance of any rest...

For the Aussies out there who are familiar with the procedures at Australian Customs, you can appreciate that there's a fair bit of documentation to get the tools of the trade out and back into the country. Once it was all sorted, the hard part of organising an overseas safari was largely over. I think there's a separate post in the whole traveling with firearms procedure.

Elephants and sustainable utilisation

So while you may not agree with a hunter's reasoning as to why he might want to hunt jumbo, now you know! 

My desire to hunt and the resultant conservation benefits are not mutually exclusive; they are actually inextricably linked. The net conservation benefit has nothing to do with why I hunt, however these benefits are very positive by-products of my hunting, a convenient truth. There will be some greater good because of my quest to hunt the world's largest land animal. 

So what could lead to a need to kill elephant and how could such action possibly have a positive outcome?  Well there are a few things, and while we can list them out for discussion, in reality they are intertwined in such a way that each is a contributing factor to the other:

• Increasing populations;
• Boundaries in the modern world;
• Carrying capacity.