After Reading This You Will Never Eat Jimmy John’s Again
Chances are, you’ve already come up with a few reasons to skip a trip to Jimmy John’s: the food itself, and perhaps you’ve heard about the slave wages offered to employees who are quite literally treated like work mules. But no, those aren’t it. After reading this, you’ll never set foot in a Jimmy John’s again – not even for the “free smells” they advertise.
A shocking report by Lara Starr, investigative writer, co-founder of The Earth Child and resident of South Africa is flopping stomachs everywhere. If you were just about to raise a Jimmy John’s Turkey Tom to your lips – please save yourself the heartache and chuck it in the bin right now.
The owner of Jimmy John’s – Jimmy John Liautaud – is a lavish and entitled trophy hunter of exotic and extremely endangered animals in Africa. According to Starr, Liautaud frequents South Africa (and sometimes Namibia or Botswana) and can easily blow over a quarter-million dollars on one shot.
According to Starr, there’s a crisis of 94 elephant poaches a day (but that is not the only big game animal JJ has killed). Isn’t it ironic that for the right price, rich boys are allowed to be driven up and effortlessly pop a large mammal in the head with a shotgun shell while sipping a cocktail? Star says the animals are lured out of their habitat, hand-tamed – sometimes for days with a few other tactics deployed on them.
Widget not in any sidebars
“Canned hunting,” she says, is even worse because it’s basically “shooting fish in a barrel.” It appears that the unsuspecting animals are just hanging out until they are downed by a “drive-by.” Literally! Starr says that, “Sometimes [trophy hunters] just shoot them from the back of a truck then go back to drinking their Gin & Tonic like it was just a bit of harmless fun.”
Look at these pictures from her report if you dare:
About the last photo – which you may have guessed correctly that it was an endangered Rhino – Starr writes:
[…]he butchered an EXTREMELY ENDANGERED female Black Rhino. She was the very last black rhino in the Mangetti National Park. Buying her just to kill her and take her horn (as a trophy) cost Jimmy over $350,000 dollars. He doesn’t seem to mind spending that much though does he? Just look how happy he is!
There are some things in this world that can be argued are morally acceptable for personal liberty and the free market – but should gunning down endangered animals be one of them? Who else is allowed to do that? Hungry people typically don’t hunt rare, exotic species. It is the favored pastime of the elite – a bloody status symbol.
Apparently, there are several justifications that are offered to keep allowing elites to hunt dwindling groups. One is that the trophy hunters call themselves “conservationists” because they claim that their proceeds go to helping repopulate the earth with the animal breed. But Starr says that less than 2% of that goes to helping. Harmless tourism, however, donates 15 times as much to helping replenish the ecosystem. Starr spent more than a year living and working in The Kruger National Park and knows the system well.
Most people who do trophy or canned hunting like this, are only fattening the wallets of wealthy game farm owners who only care to protect their own animals from poachers coming on their property. This does nothing to protect animals in the ‘wild’ national parks where most endangered animals live.
As for feeding locals, 9 times out of 10 the meat from a trophy hunt (especially if it’s a large animal) is left in the dirt for the scavengers because they cant be bothered to move the body or process it. Plus, the locals here don’t eat lions, rhinos or elephants anyway. They eat fish, chicken, pork and beef like most people around the world do.
It all amounts to “charity-washing.” (We really need to stop rationalizing bad behavior just because a so-called “philanthropist” drops a dime in a poor person’s bucket or donates a park bench.)
Lara pounds one last nail in the coffin as she implores that the fragile ecosystem needs to be better protected from assholes like this – in case anyone thought that trophy hunters were helping to cull overpopulated areas – another weak justification for the practice – just the opposite is true:
When it comes to animal numbers, I wont deny that there are some species that are breeding out of control. Impala and warthog are often culled for this reason. I know a guy that kills an impala every single day as part of his ranger job. You know why that is? BECAUSE HUNTERS HAVE KILLED MOST OF THEIR NATURAL PREDATORS. Then the prey become outnumbered, they eat up all the food before it has a chance to grow back and then all the animals starve. That’s why Rangers have to shoot so many of them to try to keep the ecosystem in balance. But that’s just it.. Nobody comes here to shoot an impala. They come here to shoot lions, leopards, elephants and other big 5 animals more than anything else, thus making the imbalance in the ecosystem even worse, not better.
Remember, it’s not really a fair fight unless the animals can shoot back. Perhaps if trophy hunts are still a “thing” in the future, they will involve a locked cage in the jungle and a no-holds-barred hand-to-hand match between the elite and the perfectly sober animal.
Image credits: The Earth Child
Please read Lara’s report!
Heather Callaghan is an independent researcher, writer, speaker and food freedom activist. She is the Editor and co-founder of NaturalBlaze. Get a nifty FREE eBook – Like at Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
