Original post from Globe and Mail by Gary Mason
Scott Ellis does not have a problem if a person wants to pay thousands of dollars for the opportunity to shoot a B.C. grizzly bear, chop off its head for mounting and leave its rotting corpse for animals to scavenge.
“Does the bear care?” says Mr. Ellis, the executive director of the Guide Outfitters Association of B.C.
“It’s already dead. Whatever you decide to do with it, he doesn’t care. And in the circle of life, there are other things that will feed off of that carcass: wolves, coyotes, birds. All that meat will be absorbed into the environment by other creatures.”
In an hour-long conversation, Mr. Ellis and I debated this subject. I told him I did not think the issue was whether the trophy hunting of grizzlies should be stopped because their numbers are dwindling, rather because it is simply wrong, period. How did his organization defend, on moral grounds, the practice of killing grizzlies for sport?