What makes me angry?

The other day I was talking to my dear friend Pat Graham about his own blog, which sometimes drips with bile and vitriol on a number of subjects (like me he loathes cant and hypocrisy; in his case he reserves a special level of hostility for the abuses inside the catholic church). I am usually a calm person, but he asked me: what makes you angry, Steve?

Today I want to cover a subject that fills me with an almost murderous rage: the poaching industry and in particular the conscienceless twats in the middle and far east who supply the demand for that hideous trade.

When I was born in 1951, millions of elephants roamed the vast savannahs of Africa, even after the big game hunters from Europe and the US had their fill of pointless slaughter. In Asia, tigers were also hunted, sometimes because they posed a threat to human beings, but thousand upon thousand of these magnificent creatures lived relatively unmolested in the wild. I pick just these two examples out of hundreds of noble creatures that were common in those days. There are many others, like the incredible pangolin of Brazil, one of the worlds most extraordinary creatures, which has been hunted almost to extinction, partly to supply zoos in the west.

Today the tiger is an endangered species, and elephants are fast approaching a similar status. Why?
In the last twenty years, with the amazing expansion of the "Tiger" economies (that's ironic, isn't it?) and especially China, getting on for 100 million people have attained the status of millionaires. Can you imagine? A new country, with the population the size of Germany, all of whom have only recently acquired immense purchasing power. And what do they want to spend their new found wealth on? Well, we know they like to travel. You can't visit a famous place anywhere in the world now, as we found in Norway last year, without rubbing shoulders with hordes of travellers from  Japan, China, South Korea and so on. If it were only that, it wouldn't be so bad. But they also want ivory, tiger penises and rhino horn for their own ignorant purposes without, apparently, the slightest care about the devastating effect their desires have on the world's wildlife. It's the old thing of power without responsibility. I wonder no one has told them Viagra works a lot better than these folk medicines.

If we take the case of China, we find there are no laws concerning the protection of animals. So it's hardly likely they're going to give a toss about animals elsewhere, except in so far as how they can exploit them for their own, incredibly stupid and selfish ends.

So yes, I am bitterly opposed to poaching, though not so much to the people on the ground who are probably poor and eking out a living in the only way they know how, but the cynical pigs in the far east who demand the products with which the poachers supply them .

Finally, while at one level I applaud Prince Charles and his son for fronting up the anti-poaching campaign, I do think it a bit of a shame that the organisers couldn't have found someone who didn't have a history of killing animals for fun built into his very genes. Now that's what I call hypocrisy...