I have a great uncle who runs an elk farm. He's often said he wants to breed albino elk because hunters will pay a fortune to bag one, but he has yet to get even one. Fortunately, regular elk will do for most. Hunters pay to come onto his land and shoot elk. He leads them out in a pickup and, depending on how trustworthy the hunter is, has his sons split off the animal he wants shot (a hunter with poor aim might unwittingly take out a mating bull or pregnant cow, thereby multiplying the cost by a factor of two or much more). "Hunters" tend to get upset if they're suddenly on the hook for a much larger bill than initially agreed upon.
Some of the customers paying to shoot elk are just frustrated hunters. They've been out hunting and simply had no luck, but didn't want to go home empty handed. For them, my uncle's farm is the backup plan. Some customers like the taste of elk and want it out of season (wild elk can be legally hunted for only a few months per year). However, there are also those who just want to shoot a big game animal but entirely lack the expertise to hunt.
Meat and velvet (antlers) are still bigger sources of income, but hunters make an impressive contribution to my uncle's revenues. My uncle started his farm in the eighties when farming elk was virtually unheard of but, even today, when Elk farms are much more common and Elk meat is on a lot of restaurant menus, Elk are still viewed as wild animals. This is not entirely inaccurate. Even the "tame" elk on my uncle's farm are quite vicious to anything shorter than them. Short hunters are advised to stay in the truck at all times!
If you want to spot an elk farm, the give-away is the 8-foot (minimum) and sturdily built fence that surrounds them. Elk are excellent jumpers and bulls have the mass of a bovine cow. Imagine a cow that can clear a six foot fence, and you have an idea of what elk are like.
Interesting story, I get Elk antlers for my dogs to chew on and they are pretty expensive for even a small piece. It has always made me wonder how profitable it is for people who sell Elk antlers and other types of animal antlers. Although I doubt you can really scale up antler production very easily.
We do the same thing in Texas for white tail deer, and other exotics.
I'd say the life they lead up to "harvest" is significantly better than that of a commercial chicken or pig. Live on huge ranches - with a steady and regulated feed supply, and are encouraged to breed?
> Hunting ranches have been widely credited with saving the rhinoceros from extinction in the 1960s, when there were just an estimated 575,000 large wild animals in the country.
Megafauna compete human beings: they eat us, or they eat our food, or they displace our food. We're really, really good at competing.
Fortunately, private property rights give an incentive for people to protect & foster animals they would otherwise have an incentive to kill. No sane person would want to live within range of a lion—unless he derived some benefit from it. That's precisely what these operations do: they have every reason to preserve the species they are each interested in (yes, even the non-mutants, because they provide breeding stock).
Now, I don't particularly get why anyone would want to shoot a more-or-less captive animal: for me and every other huntsman I know, the fun really is in the pursuit, in trying to match the animals' advantages with our own. I could see paying for a white tiger skin rug (it'd be pretty), but I can't imagine tromping out some ranch, riding out in a truck and shooting it myself. What'd be the point? I don't go to a cattle ranch and shoot steers; I don't go to a potato farm and pull potatoes.
> I don't particularly get why anyone would want to shoot a more-or-less captive animal: for me and every other huntsman I know, the fun really is in the pursuit
If the land area was large enough you could have the best of both.
This happens in lots of places. Around the Rocky Mountains there are elk breeders and huge ranches for the same purpose. Depending on the size of the bull (or specifically his rack) the price can reach tens of thousands of dollars.
It would help if social media didn't erupt into massive storms of outrage every time someone took a photo of themselves with a dead lion that they shot on a safari ranch.
Why is this any worse than our current meat industry? Seams overall less cruel, honestly. Or would you use the same rhetoric for all non-vegans?
We breed animals for a specific purpose and then we kill them. I'm not a fan of it, but I don't consider all participants in this system to be horrible people. I count myself among them--I eat eggs and dairy, which is easily at least as cruel as the steaks and hunting I avoid.
If I want to eat meat (I do, it's delicious), what is the ethical difference between killing it myself (gun, bow, spear, knife) and paying someone else to do the killing in a slaughterhouse? I feel like there is no difference, though I'm not sure how I can argue for it.
If I were not killing the animal in order to eat the meat, how is paying someone for the opportunity to kill their elk/cow/bird/fish ethically distinct from being an employee at a slaughterhouse, or a fisherman? If the farmer is going to harvest the meat for eating, does it matter who kills it? It seems to me that there isn't much difference, and that they are ethically similar.
I guarantee that commercial sport hunting of farm-raised game animals in the US almost always results in near-complete processing for food, hides, etc.
In cases of elk, deer, bison, pheasant: the entire animal is used.
There's just no scenario where someone raising these animals is going to let them go to waste. Meat is expensive, hides are expensive. At the very least, you'll feed the remains of the animal to your dogs or other carnivores.
If I needed the food, sure, but I don't. I actually save money and improve my health by not eating meat and instead eating vegetables. We choose meat, in the US, for the pleasure of eating it.
Some of the customers paying to shoot elk are just frustrated hunters. They've been out hunting and simply had no luck, but didn't want to go home empty handed. For them, my uncle's farm is the backup plan. Some customers like the taste of elk and want it out of season (wild elk can be legally hunted for only a few months per year). However, there are also those who just want to shoot a big game animal but entirely lack the expertise to hunt.
Meat and velvet (antlers) are still bigger sources of income, but hunters make an impressive contribution to my uncle's revenues. My uncle started his farm in the eighties when farming elk was virtually unheard of but, even today, when Elk farms are much more common and Elk meat is on a lot of restaurant menus, Elk are still viewed as wild animals. This is not entirely inaccurate. Even the "tame" elk on my uncle's farm are quite vicious to anything shorter than them. Short hunters are advised to stay in the truck at all times!
If you want to spot an elk farm, the give-away is the 8-foot (minimum) and sturdily built fence that surrounds them. Elk are excellent jumpers and bulls have the mass of a bovine cow. Imagine a cow that can clear a six foot fence, and you have an idea of what elk are like.