By Dave Neale, Animals Asia Animal Welfare Director

From Cecil the lion to 298 bears shot in Florida - it’s a reflection of the power of the hunting lobby that they’ve effectively argued black is white by suggesting you can save animals by killing them.

What I am about to write is so obvious that it shouldn’t need reiterating. But I’ll say it and next time you read someone arguing that their blood lust is actually an act of conservation you can respond accordingly.

Here goes:

“Saving animals by killing them is every bit as insane as it sounds.”

It doesn’t matter if they argue that trophy hunting funds wider conservation activities or that animals will somehow benefit from being “culled”. These are their justifications – and people who care about the survival and well-being of these animals should not accept them.

Human population growth and our increased consumption rates force more and more animals into smaller and smaller areas. Then we have the audacity to say these animals need to be controlled for their own benefit. In doing so we allow ourselves to “play God” – to decide which animals get to live or die.

The perpetrators and the supporters of these acts use words such as “sustainable harvest” and “population management” in an attempt to create a barrier between the act and the way it is perceived.

In reality, a person has taken it upon themselves to take a deadly weapon, track down an animal – which in many cases has little space to run and hide – and to shoot that animal knowing that such an act will cause fear, pain and suffering.

And knowing that they will extinguish all life from that living being.

What possesses somebody to a) think this is morally acceptable, and that they have been given the right to decide which living creatures stay alive and which ones die, and b) believe that what they are doing is actually good for animals?

Such acts can only be performed by those that have mistakenly placed themselves at the top of an imaginary chain, putting humans as the dominant species with the right to take action to control the lives of all those that come “beneath us”.

In fact, we are part of an interdependent system, with people and animals living side by side. The problem is that perpetrators of animal slaughter do not play by the rules and therefore the animals find themselves betrayed every which way they turn.

By adopting an interdependency approach to living with all wild animals, we would be able to live with larger numbers of animals and find humane alternatives to prevent animal populations from outstripping the small pieces of habitat that we have left them with.

Unfortunately this remains a minority viewpoint and therefore the hunting lobby is able to spin the concept  that killing animals is actually good for them. That animal populations must be controlled so that they do not threaten our over-sterilised lifestyles.

They’ll even argue that this process this can raise vital funds for the conservation of the very animals they are killing.

If a hunter claims to be providing funding for conservation by paying governing authorities to be given a “legal right” to kill an animal, then why do they not simply donate the funds?  Then they can be used for important habitat conservation and education work that is needed – no killing required.

Except this isn’t about conservation – it’s entirely about hunting.

The buzz they are chasing isn’t from “doing good”.  The trophy they are chasing is a dead animal and the story of how their privilege enabled its murder.

Jane Goodall responds to the death of #CecilTheLion https://t.co/13sJew2hv3 pic.twitter.com/U9WRqGBggj

— Intl. Business Times (@IBTimes) July 29, 2015

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