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Cull or Not to Cull? Take a look at Most Talked ‘Animal Culling Incidents’

Thousands of camels were gunned down in Australia in Jan 2020 as a part of animal culling, the fresh one is 70 elephants in Bostwana 


Botswana, a country in Brazil is going to auction licenses to hunt a total of 70 elephants in a bid to ‘end human-wildlife conflict’. This will be the first instance of such hunt to take place since President Mokgweetsi Masisi lifted the five-year hunting ban in 2019.

Elephant’s population is declining in Africa but in countries like Botswana and Zimbabwe are facing overpopulation of them.  This has led the Botswana government to kill the elephants to avoid ‘man-human conflict’. Botswanan officials have said that hunting is necessary to ease the conflict between humans and animals. Famers were suffering as their infrastructure and crops are destroyed by elephants roaming outside their freeing zones.

Zimbabwe found a great solution to decrease the population of Elephants

Zimbabwe, on the other hand, has dealt with the overpopulation of elephants without cruelty. They sold their animals to China and Dubai and were willing to sell it to any interested country and bear the cost of transportation.

Why animals are killed across the world and what is the term for it?

 Killing a selective killing of species is called wildlife culling. It is carried out mostly to control the over-population of animals so that human-animal conflict can be curbed. Animals culling are also carried out to decrease the number of animals who are believed to be harmful to crops or which carry diseases. Disease carrying animals are tagged as ‘vermin’ and their culling is allowed for a certain period of time. You can use crossbows for culling the birds.

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For example, many birds are often killed whenever there is a bird flu outbreak in India.  Nilgai in Bihar, Rhesus Macaque monkey in Himachal Pradesh and Wild Boar in Uttarakhand were declared vermin earlier and they were usually killed. In India, Section 62 of the Wild Life Protection Act, 1972 allows the central government to declare certain animals as vermin and allow their culling.

This January in Australia, about 5,000- 10,000 camels were shot down by the Australian authorities in a five-day operation using snipers mounted on helicopters.  Around 2012, Australia was culling more than 75,000 camels every year.

Every time when animals are killed, people argue that killing animals are not in harmony with the human’s ethos of living in consonance with nature.

Governments of the concerned country should come up with a concrete solution which is viable in the longer run. One idea that surfaces are, the relocation of animals to protected sanctuaries or any other place which is not dangerous for both the animals and humans.

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