Joe Rogan | Trophy Hunting Protects Animals w/Adam Conover

Don't want to hear the truth about it. We did one about trophy hunting animals, about how, because people get so mad, oh look at this guy, shut a lion, right? And the truth is that in some countries, not 100% of the time, but in some countries they are effectively using trophy hunting as a way to protect the animals, because that's how they're able to monetize in that place. And get money coming in in order to protect the animals, and they're very specific and strategic about it, and it can be part of a good, sort of animal management strategy, and it's being used to some success. And yeah, people don't want to hear that, right? It's still really hard. That's a weird one to me, and I hunt. Yeah. Yeah, the whole lion and elephant thing. Right. Ooh, that's a weird one. Well, what they can do is they can say, okay, well we've got these elephants. One of these elephants is an old male that's like killing the other elephants, right? And if we organize these hunts where you gotta pay half a million dollars for the right to even go in there. Does that happen with old male elephants? I know that was the issue with that giraffe. That, remember that woman that got in trouble? I actually don't know that specific case. Yeah, there was a woman who got in trouble because she shot this really beautiful giraffe. It was really dark and unusually colored, and it was dark because it was very old. The older the giraffe, apparently the males would get really dark. It was really cool looking. But she shot it and everybody went crazy on the internet because she was posing and smiling with this giraffe. But apparently that giraffe had to be killed because it had killed at least two, maybe three young males, and it was no longer of a viable breeding age. So they were in this situation where they didn't have the money to take it and bring it to a zoo somewhere. And they would have gotten money from having this woman come in and shoot it. So that's what they did. That's sort of the idea. One of the issues is if you've got an area where, one of the problems is you need to have a reason for the people who live in the place to care about the animals. If it's just like, hey, the elephants are gonna roam free. Well, you've got people there who are like, all right, fine. So I'm living near some elephants. Occasionally they eat my crops and shit, and that annoys me. Not just occasionally. Yeah, exactly. I don't give a shit about that. And what that allows to happen is allows poachers to come in and kill them wantonly. But if instead, okay, we're protecting them, we have a revenue stream, right? We get money when hunters come in and pay a lot of money to go kill one animal, right? Now we've got a way to hire guards. We've got a way, this is now a resource that we're protecting, right? And that sounds a little cynical, but it is working in some places. It's both, it's cynical and effective. And effective, and we had a woman on from the IUCN, International Thank You Union for Conservation of Nature, big conservation group, talking about how this is effective. Now in some places, if you've got a corrupt government, whether they're just gonna pocket the bunny, yeah, that's bad, right? But the point is, just because the mere idea of someone going overseas and killing an animal is not necessarily the worst thing in the world. We have to look at the details of the situation. And that's hard for animal lovers to hear. Animal lovers don't like to hear that. Yeah, they don't, they don't. And I, like I said, I don't like to hear it. I wish to hear it either. I wish people would just, it just, what freaks me out more than anything is that there's no other options. It's not like a bunch of people are donating a bunch of money to keep these areas clean and free of poachers. The amount would be massive, right? We can donate money, but yeah. Yeah, that's the, when you've got a problem that big and intractable as how do you save these animals? You know, and against habitat encroachment, right? Again, you know, people wanna farm on that land. People, you know, people have lives, right? They're not sitting around going, the people in those countries are not sitting around going, oh, I love the cute elephant. Like we have the luxury to do. They like fucking live there, right? And so how do you get those people in that society to really protect those animals? That's a hard question to answer. And some places are having success with that strategy. And that's something that we can understand. We don't have to approve of it in every single case. And we can say, that's really tough for us as animal lovers. And in fact, the character who I'm talking to on the show says, I still just hate the idea of an animal being killed, right? And I say, yeah, so do I, right? We try to dramatize that emotional, you know, resistance on the show, like that emotional reaction that we have. Yeah, I also don't like the idea of an animal being killed brutally. You know, I think I'm uncomfortable with the idea, right? But if my main goal is to preserve the population of these animals overall, this other from going extinct, maybe I need to accept that this tough truth that once in a while, one's gotta be shot through the head with a rifle. Maybe I need to accept that. It's weird, right? That's what I chose about it. It's really weird when it comes to things that people don't eat, like lions and stuff. I get it, I don't understand the psychology. I feel like Michael Douglas in the, what was that movie with Val Kelmer? The Ghost in the Darkness, that the lions that decided to kill those dudes that are working on the road. I've never heard of this movie. Oh, it's a great movie, man. It's a great movie. The Ghost in the Darkness. Yeah, I feel like it's from the 90s, but it's a really good movie about a true story about this guy that they brought, Michael Douglas' character was brought in to hunt these lions that were systematically targeting and killing these workers that worked on this railroad. This team of lions worked together and started eating people. Wow. It's a great movie. It's really good. It sounds odd, and they have to go for the lions. Yeah, they have to go kill these lions. Yeah, there it is. Ghost in the Darkness. Oh, holy shit. Hail, biting, tension. That is a great, Val Kelmer's looking good there. Yeah, that was pre-Fazzo Val Kelmer. Pre-when he went up the day. It was too handsome. He couldn't handle anymore. He had to go like. Too handsome. That's the problem. He had to just go off the deep end. Oh. Oh.