There's no reason any of this should be political. Yes, I own a tank business and a ranch that I lose millions of dollars on a year on. Conservation isn't cheap when you have 10,000+ mouths to feed.
We have never hunted a giraffe and never will. We purchased five giraffes and now have 14 on the property, thanks to our conservation efforts. I wrote a blog post on this if anyone is interested in a little more information.
https://www.oxhuntingranch.com/blog/ranch-vision-and-owner/
I'd happily shut down all hunting tomorrow if someone wanted to pay our bills. It's easy for people to say what's right and wrong without actually doing anything themselves to make a difference.
The fact some of you are hinting that I should lose my property and domains simply
because you disagree with my views is not a only threat to freedom but a threat to life itself. This type of ideology is exactly why I believe in the second amendment!
Interesting from the post below the one linked, thanks for posting.
I’m willing to bet $25,000 that Ox Ranch’s animals quality of life beats the highest rated Wholefood’s national distributors. I challenge any anti-hunter to take me up on this bet and prove me wrong. The requirement to collect on this bet is that the investigation will require on-site documented proof of both the national distributor as well as Ox Ranch. I believe Wholefoods is the gold standard of the grocery world and is the very reason I’d like our animal well-being compared to theirs.
You’ll also find that our animals are happier and healthier than those confined to small enclosures in zoos. I recently visited a zoo for the first time since purchasing Ox Ranch and was saddened to see how depressed the animals looked. The most shocking thing that I noticed was how dull and unhealthy the animal coats looked.
Ox Ranch is 18,000 acres, and while it’s a huge property, the land can only sustain so many animals. The property was overgrazed before my purchase and continues to be so. If it weren’t for the $500,000 we spend a year on supplemental feed hundreds if not thousands of animals would starve to death.
The wildlife population would double every two to four years if the ranch were absent of both predators and hunters. This growth would ultimately result in our feed bill growing exponentially, and at some point, either predators or hunting would once again be the solution. Ox Ranch doesn’t have any predators. However, we do have plenty of hunters to help offset a portion of our losses as well as keep herds in check.
Australia is one of if the not the most prominent anti-hunting and gun countries in the world, and yet they slaughter around 5 million kangaroos annually according to government reports. (Gray, 2013). The independent.co.uk reports 1.5 million were murdered in 2015 to protect grasslands and wildlife. (Bulman 2017). The worst thing is that I’d be surprised if they harvest even a small percentage of this slaughter for food!
What do you do with populations that don’t have predators and whose numbers keep growing? Should we let these animals starve to death when the land can’t support them?
It’s funny how many people are anti-hunting but support what Peta is doing. According to the HuffingtonPost Peta took in $51,933,000 in donations in 2014, while simultaneously murdering 81% of the of animals at it’s Norfolk, Virginia shelter (Greenwood, 2015). Ox Ranch takes in $0 in donations, is losing millions of dollars, and hunts just a few percent of our animals a year.
It’s horrible to hear this, but if there were a viable alternative for these animals, I’m confident Peta would be doing it.
There are somewhere around 550,000 whitetail deer hunted a year in Texas with an additional 100,00 killed from car accidents (Tompkins, 2008). I can’t even begin to imagine how many car accidents there would be if the state didn’t offer hunting permits to control their population. The accident totals would continue to compound as the grass in the fields becomes further overgrazed, and the highway grass became more desired.
Any solution besides hunting, euthanizing, culling, or whatever else you may call it, is a band-aid solution until funding or food runs out. Eventually, Earth’s population is going to hit an unsustainable number, and humanity is going to have to make some difficult decisions. We either figure out a cheap form of space travel and colonization or be destined to a future filled with wars and famine.
It’s all about sustainability, without sustainability there is no long-term solution. We have many endangered species at Ox Ranch, and while we hunt a few, their numbers continue to grow while shrinking in their native lands.
There’s rarely a perfect solution, but the fact is what we’re doing in Texas works, provides meat on the table, brings tax revenue in, and is saving many species from the brink of extinction such as the scimitar-horned oryx, addax, and dama gazelle. (Freemantle, 2012).
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this, as well as further educating yourself on what is a very sensitive topic. I invite you to continue the conversation by commenting below.