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As the nation eulogizes George H. W. Bush, few mention that Bush along with former Vice President Dan Quayle and the late Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. was a proud member of Safari Club International (SCI), a shockingly bloodthirsty group that promotes Teddy Roosevelt style big-game trophy hunting. All three pleaded with the Botswana government to keep trophy lion hunts available, for trophy hunters like them. There were reports of lions that Bush and Quayle personally killed in Africa but they remain unconfirmed.
Rich Americans, Europeans and Japanese have slaughtered so many mature male lions in Botswana that trophy hunters use a "mane-extension service" to make the immature lions they kill look more fierce for mounting by weaving fake manes on to them. What he-men.
Safari Club International offers a "Bears of the World" award, a kind of National Geographic for the bloodthirsty, in which hunters have to kill four of the world's eight bear species which include imperiled polar bears. In 2006, SCI defeated an amendment to the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the House of Representatives that would have banned the import of sport-hunted polar bear trophies from Canada.
Safari Club International also has Disabled Hunter, Sensory Safari and Safari Wish programs to extend the fun of killing to the disadvantaged. On it web site, SCI showed how the Safari Wish program enabled a spina bifida patient to kill a young doe from his wheelchair at a Florida hunt club. The young man missed two hogs eating at the feeder but succeeded in shooting a greyhound-sized doe because "the Hunt Club suspended the deer harvest rules for his hunt" SCI wrote breathlessly. Did someone hold the deer for him while he shot it as is done with blind "sportsmen"?
A few years ago SCI tried another whitewash. In an attempt to humanize its image, SCI debuted Sportsmen Against Hunger and Sportsmen Against Cancer hoping someone will eat the meat the rich "hunters" like to shoot but don't really want to eat. Sportsmen Against Cancer gave game meat free to cancer patients "whose ability to recover can be adversely affected by non-organic meats that contain hormones," said SCI.
"We don't call our meat organic," said Angie Hall, chairperson of the Naples/Fort Myers Safari Club which held a Sportsmen Against Cancer event attended by Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. "However, it is not very likely that wild animals were injected with hormones. Patients swear by the program. The meat builds their strength."
"We're able to provide the proper type of nutrition to people with cancer," agreed Stormin' Norman after his prostate cancer diagnosis in 1993.
While the American Cancer Society is fighting "fast and furious" to find the cure, wrote Hall on the SCI Foundation web site, "I know there are sportsmen and women who are going to see that today's cancer patients will have the wild game they need now to see the cure for their future."
Since Bush, Trump's sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have continued the White House-related promotion of big-game trophy hunting. They have posed with an elephant, leopard, crocodile and other animals they gleefully killed in Zimbabwe; Trump defends them as "great shots, they love it."
(Article changed on December 3, 2018 at 21:07)
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