A Blog of Two Halves

I have been running my blog: Ranting the Day Away for a couple of years.  My musings, opinions and my self improvement journey have all featured there and I have loved doing it.  I have been more honest, sometimes brutally honest, in that blog than in any other aspect of my life.  If someone asked me for a definition of who I was, I would have directed them to the blog.

 

A friend recently described the way I write as being that she could hear my voice through the words I had put on the page.  I think of that it as a compliment as I believe that you can only be yourself and if that comes across in my writing, then I have achieved my aim.

 

Recently however I have set up an additional blog called Words of a Curve.  The idea for this blog was to deal with the side of me that I didn’t talk about on Ranting the Day Away, the plus size part of me and all the stories that lie within it.  Over the course of the month I have done various posts and have gotten a good reaction to them.  As well as the “outfit of the day” posts I have put the stories in there too.  I have even more honest with this blog and have said and done things with it that I never thought I could actually do.

 

Today though, a thought struck me.  I was still hiding.  Keeping the two blogs separate just didn’t make sense, either for the upkeep or for the question of which post to put on which blog.  The plus size girl was still hiding around the corner, now saying the occasional thing but letting the loud speaker of the first blog do all the talking.  Well, sod that.

 

So here I am.  Merged. 

 

The title of the blog is The Curved Opinion which seems to fit the joining of the two blogs.  The whole me, the whole truth, just as ranty as before.   I’m still going to write as I intended to from the start.  You know the phrase “Dance like there is no one watching”.  Well my phrase for this blog is “Write as if no one in the world will read it”.

 

Now that feels much better J

Trophy Hunting - Are we Really Still Neanderthals?

Millionaire banker Sir David Scholey, a so called "nice guy" according to the Guardian has been pictured recently, after one of his trophy hunting holidays, posing over the corpse of a lion he killed, for sport.

He is quoted saying:

“I have been hunting all over the world for many, many years and I have always hunted within the legal arrangements of the country concerned.  

“All the animals I hunt are wild beasts and even I have felt threatened by them at times.  The lion I killed certainly wasn’t an endangered species where I was hunting it."

Trophy hunting and Canned Hunting is taking place in South Africa, Nambia, Botswana, Mozambique where people essentially can pay to shoot animals, either by trophy hunting in a large area or by canned hunting, as described in the link.

The amount of animals available to these trophy hunters are vast, but include elephants, lions and leopards.  Interestingly and also more telling are a number of websites I have researched, all readily accessible and a click away, which I won't name, giving a link with a Rhinosaurus on the front, an endangered species, as a link to their brochure.

I asked in the the title, are we still Neanderthals?  But really, that title does not apply to these trophy hunters.  The Neanderthals killed to eat, used the furs to keep warm, in essence, to survive.  The trophy hunters do it for the blood lust, the thrill (apparently) of killing an animal greater and stronger than yourself.  The cowards way, with a bullet, with no hope of the animal fighting back.

Going back to what (Sir) David Scholey, said, he claimed that the animal he killed wasn't on the endangered list.  With trophy killers, poachers and an ever decreasing availability of land for the lions to use, how long will it be before lions are on the endangered list?  That day is edging closer every day.

Humans are the most dangerous animal on the planet.  If we are not careful, we are going to lose all these amazing animals which will end up as nothing more as a head mounted on a someone's wall or an exhibit in a museum.  It is time for people to be proactive if we want to help conserve the wild animals on this planet.

Join the causes, donate to the charities, speak your mind rather than going "It's not my problem, why should I care".  These animals have just as much a right to the planet as we do.  Do we really want to be left in a position where nothing wild is left in the world?