The liberal media and it's activist zealots will have you believe that every animal is sacred. I disagree. Unless you are a vegan, you eat or have eaten beef. Do you know where your beef comes from? Do you worry about the lives of those animals, or only the majestic animals that society deems are inappropriate for us to kill?
The hamburger you ate for dinner started out on a ranch. If he was in Texas or Arizona, some of his herd probably died from the heat. If he was in the more northern states, some of them froze to death instead. If they survived the temperatures, they were afforded the luxury of getting branded with a fire iron, getting their testicles ripped away, and their horns were cut or burned off.
Once their beautiful life on the ranch has come to an end, they get sent to a feedlot. Feedlots are these wonderlands of pure enjoyment, where the cows frolic in the feces-filled holding pens and get chronic digestive problems from the foods they're given to fatten up. The air is always fresh with ammonia and methane due to the amount of manure. We give them drugs though, to keep them breathing.
These are the animals society has deemed it okay for us to eat. Not only that, these animals have to be raised in these conditions and fed to us in this manner if we don't all intend to hunt and we wish to sustain ourselves on meat. There are simply too many people with too high demand of beef for us to raise the amount of cows we need in a hospitable environment. However, there isn't a public outcry for the thousands of these cows every year that live an existence of torture and abuse. We instead focus on big game hunters who kill one lion in Africa and take a picture with it.
First and foremost, the African lion is not endangered. That is a common misconception. The Obama administration has recently proposed listing the animal as threatened. If it is listed as threatened, it will still be legal to kill those lions even in America with the proper permits, but I'm not here to argue semantics. If it were to be listed as endangered or threatened and outlawed, of course I'm all for preservation of the species, but we aren't there yet.
I don't believe in hunting these animals purely as a trophy. However, I do believe that as long as you eat the meat and it isn't illegal to hunt, I don't care what animal you kill. Why do we treat these predators as a majestic animal who deserve a more dignified death than the deer, cows, or pigs we kill regularly? I think the public has a delusion that the majority of the animals in the wild live a full life to begin with. While a bullet in the head is not the most humane way to go, the savage lifestyle of living as a free-range animal predominantly lends itself to dying either by starvation, weather conditions, or being eaten alive. They don't usually grow old and die like we assume. Darwinism is the most evident in these species.
I feel the same way about the countries that eat dog meat. While I love my dog dearly and shutter at the idea he would ever be food, we do not live in a country where it is common place. It is all a matter of what was available that determined what was "ordinary". We have no right to judge.
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