![]() breeders animals are no longer imported from foreign countries. Smaller ranches like 5 Star, as well as bigger ones like Jeff Rann's 777 Ranch, get virtually all their animals now from U.S. Tess Talley with a wildebeest she shot on a hunt at 5 Star Outfitters in Texas. According to Seale, exotics quickly began to fill a financial void for ranchers, becoming so lucrative for some that they even switched from an inventory of domestic livestock to exotics. During that time, zoos also began selling and giving away animals. The trade can be traced back to the 1940s, when fluctuating domestic livestock prices and the severe Texas drought drove many ranchers to abandon and sell their land. "The animals on their ranch need to be profitable, otherwise they're not going to stay on their ranch very long - because we can't keep animals that don't have an income." "A rancher is a small-business person, and they have to make a profit," said Seale. Wildebeest hunts, like the one the Talleys purchased, average $4,000. ![]() For them, hunting is a wildlife population management tool.Īs long as ranchers in the nation's top cattle-raising state continue to transform farmland into something resembling an African safari, trophy hunters like Talley are able to pay top-dollar fees to keep this industry running. The EWA was established in 1967 and currently has 2,700 fee-paying members, who subscribe to the idea that without breeders and hunters, exotic wildlife would suffer. "Value comes from the ability to freely trade and sell, and buy from other breeders," said Charly Seale, a rancher and executive director of the Exotics Wildlife Association (EWA), the largest and oldest pro-hunting group that promotes the exotic wildlife trade in the U.S. She expressed other doubts about what goes on at the ranches: "What are they actually breeding? Are they even from Africa?" "Hunters are then driven up to the area where animal is eating and they're shot there." "Animals are fenced-in, hand-reared, hand-fed, and they're baited so food is out when hunters come," Block told CBS News. as canned hunts, motivated by the desire to obtain a so-called trophy. Block described the hunting of exotics in the U.S. "The domestic wildlife trade is the dirty underbelly of trophy hunting industry," said Kitty Block, CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, an animal welfare group that opposes the practice.
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