There are countless endangered species of plants and animals. One way to preserve those species from extinction is to make private ownership of endangered animals illegal (except for zoos, perhaps). Despite these efforts, often decades long, many animals that were endangered remain so. John Stossel’s offered a solution to this problem: allow widespread private ownership of endangered animals for commercial purposes. In a blog post entitled, Save Lions. Eat them, Stossel writes that
A restaurant in Mesa, Arizona is selling lion meat burgers. Enter the animal rights activists:
Dr. Grey Stafford with the World Wildlife Zoo says that serving a threatened species sends the wrong message. “Of all the plentiful things to eat in this country, for someone to request that or to offer that… I was rather stunned,” says Stafford.
… Animal rights advocates are expected to protest outside[the restaurant].But why? Lions are listed as “threatened.” The best way to save threatened and endangered species is to…eat them
The American bison are the best example A hundred years ago, they were on the verge of extinction. They were hunted almost to extinction because no one owned them. It was the Tragedy of the Commons. No one owned the bison, so no one had an incentive to protect them.
Then ranchers began to fence in the bison and (gasp!) farm them. Today, America has half a million bison. We don’t have a shortage of chickens, either.
(Citations omitted.)
There are private land purchases to support conservation, like those of the Nature Conservancy, but should there be private ownership of now-exotic animals, leading to widespread farming, etc.?
I think it’s worth trying, and should not be discouraged. A traditional model of conservation could be improved upon, as Stossel’s example of the bison illustrates.
(Bison, by the way, weren’t just outside a private property model; they were victims of a public, government-backed policy of extermination. They both lacked private protection and were part of public eradication efforts. Consider, as cited in Wikipedia, Hanson, Emma I. Memory and Vision: Arts, Cultures, and Lives of Plains Indian People. Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 2007: 211.)