And thus we see what rational natural conservation has to face: people like the commentator above who will never accept that the hunter is the best friend of nature because he or she is ideologically opposed to the idea that some rich man with a gun will do more to help endangered species than thousands of metropolitan liberals ever will. It is a religion to them; faced with facts and statistics, they scream that science is on their side, when it isn’t, they conflate illegal poaching with legal, sustainable, controlled hunting (one of the reasons why Kenya has such a big poaching problem is the fact that local economies are strapped for income and don’t see any value in keeping these animals alive as they cannot use them to generate sustainable income while keeping the population intact), they take examples of mismanagement of natural resources from across the globe and use to to try and show how perfectly decent systems of conservation and land management are wrong. Emotive screaming with nothing behind it. Anything rather than accept that they are mistaken in their faith (and it is a faith, a religion to them). The RSPB and RSPCA have both failed in their purpose, shifting to an ideological campaign against those who have worked to preserve and maintain land in this country for their entire lives. They would rather see all hunting banned and suffer the consequences than swallow their pride and accept the benefits. Rather than protect animals and birds, they’d rather see them die out than have their sensibilities offended. They have a mental construct of the gamekeeper and the hunter as hulking, evil monsters that must be destroyed that does not at all match reality. Until they learn to move past their ideology into reality, conservation in this country and across the world will never be safe.