Steve,
Thank you for your reply.
That sport hunting actually protects and improves the long term survivability of a species is a very difficult concept for people understand.
Even the vast majority of hunters in the USA don't understand it because we don't have a trophy fee system as is used in Africa where one pays a license fee then pays a daily fee to hunt and if successful pays a fee for each animal collected.
In the USA we just pay a license fee which is very minimal for residents of the state in which the hunting is done. It is very difficult for the average hunter to understand that with out his license fee's and the fee's collected in taxes from his sporting goods purchases we would have far fewer game animals and more importantly less open country to hunt them.
Our fee system here in the USA is very transparent when compared to many other hunting locations.
I would guess that in the UK one must pay the land owner a daily fee and a collection fee for his buck?
In Africa there are three types of areas generally hunted. Private ranches, Government hunting blocks and communal areas. In the last two types of areas they are usually vast blocks of land with little or no human inhabitation. And they are kept wild and uninhabited with fees from sport hunters and sport hunters fees ONLY.
Without these fees these vast tracts of land would have been settled long ago and the animals would have disappeared. In cases like Kenya where this has happened due to the cessation of sport hunting. There are no wild animals left outside of their various national and private game parks.
If the international anti hunting lobby ever gets it s way and stops sport hunting in Africa there will be a massive and rapid kill off of most of the continents remaining wild game. It's been proven time and again.