Should we ban animal hunting in Africa?

Your final assignment for our course will be a 2,000-word paper. In this assignment, your task will be to present one of the issues that we discussed in this course, articulate your position on that issue, and respond to possible objections that someone might make against your position. Fortunately, you should all be in a good position to write such a paper given that your weekly discussions contain virtually all of the elements you’ll need. But you will still need to pull all of these elements together in a sophisticated way in order to succeed on this assignment. Given that you and your classmates have already done much of the work that will be involved in writing this paper, I should take a moment to explain why we are giving you this assignment and why it is worth so much toward your final grade. The paper that we are asking to write here follows a formula that is very popular in persuasive contexts. Many undergraduates struggle to write this kind of paper because they have never been taught how to do so, and because there are so many different skills involved. Over the course of this semester, you have been practicing each of the main skills required to write one of these papers, and now it is time to prove that you can put them all together in order to generate high quality philosophical writing. From our perspective, presenting your ideas clearly and compellingly is a major achievement. With that in mind, we should mention that we will be subjecting these papers to much higher standards than we have used in evaluating your discussion board postings and exam responses over the course of the semester. If you get an A on this paper, it will be because you presented a thoughtful and nuanced discussion of your chosen topic, not simply a cobbling together of discussion board postings or regurgitated points from our lecture videos. Topic: Controversy erupted this summer after a lion was lured out of a Zimbabwean wildlife refuge and shot by an American trophy hunter. For some commentators, the incident revealed the need to carefully enforce local laws defining when and how hunters may kill animals. Yet others went further, arguing that precious and threatened species like African lions should be protected from hunting altogether. In this week’s readings and lecture videos, we have encountered several arguments for the claim that hunting should play a significant role in African efforts to protect local wildlife. Yet judging by the public’s reaction to the death of Cecil the lion, such arguments are far from uncontroversial. On the contrary, it is widely believed that hunting should be barred to protect precious and threatened species. For this week’s discussion assignment, your jobs will be to explore this debate.