By Frank Miniter
April 9, 2012
The true story behind Donald Trump Jr.’s safari, the dead elephant, and the media circus that erupted when a photo of him holding the elephant’s severed tail needs to be heard. It says something profound about men, about contemporary media bias and about what it really means to be an honest environmentalist today.
For the inside story I interviewed Donald Jr. He was raring to talk. The media slammed him, but then didn’t care about getting the true story.
First, the media fallout: Somehow TMZ, a celebrity scandalmonger website, obtained photos (even the Trumps don’t know how they got them) of Donald Trump Sr.’s two sons, 34-year-old Donald and 28-year-old Eric, on an African safari posing with that dead elephant as well as a leopard, crocodile, Cape buffalo and more.
TMZ ran the photos with a quote calling the Trump boys “pitiful bloodthirsty morons.”
TMZ also quoted Jack Carone, from the animal-rights group In Defense of Animals, saying, “Privilege has clearly not bought them the sensitivity or wisdom to view the world as anything but their personal playground, including the imagined entitlement to end the lives of sensitive and social animals for mere amusement.”
Something didn’t add up. Donald Trump Jr. has never played the part of the spoiled playboy son of a mega-rich Manhattanite. Sure, his father is Donald Trump Sr., a real estate tycoon revered for his business acumen, a man people can’t wait to hear say, “You’re fired” on NBC’s “The Celebrity Apprentice.” And Donald Jr. certainly has the good looks Hollywood would cast as the careless son of an American magnate. However, his reputation is clean. He’s a hardworking family man. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Finance and Real Estate from the renowned Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an ambassador for Operation Smile, a children’s medical charity that provides cleft-lip and palate repair surgeries to poor children worldwide. He is an executive vice president at The Trump Organization. He spends his days waist deep in real-estate appraisals and other corporate interests. When he appears on “The Celebrity Apprentice” he always seems like a mature professional. When I spoke to him he had the demeanor of a polite, smart and civilized gentleman—not the slightest hint of blood thirst could be detected.
Nevertheless, Carone’s characterization made sense to TMZ’s viewers, as well as to all the media outlets that piled on. When TMZ asked in a poll on its website if what the Trump’s did was “barbaric” or “fair game,” 72 percent clicked “barbaric.”
Perhaps some people just enjoy seeing celebrities torn down. But the attack was deeper than photos. TMZ said (without anyone manning up enough to add their byline): “Donald Trump’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, are under investigation in Zimbabwe to determine if their hunting trip … was actually legal.” Then TMZ said the “independent Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force said that Trump’s sons used a South African safari firm that is not registered in Zimbabwe during their 2011 hunting trip.”
All of that and more is available in a Google search. But here’s what most of the media wouldn’t next report.
First, what was with that elephant tail? Donald Jr. told me that TMZ didn’t report that Africans traditionally cut off the tail and make bracelets from the tail hair. TMZ didn’t seem to know—again, because they didn’t do any reporting—that Africans do this as a sign of respect for the fallen animal. And they didn’t report that elephants are over-populated in the area the Trumps hunted and so need to be hunted to prevent them from further destroying their habitat. They didn’t mention that when elephants overpopulate they literally rip down the forest. They didn’t note—and any conservation group could have told them this—the result of an overpopulated elephant herd is death by starvation and disease. Nor did they did contact the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority to find out that hunting is managed scientifically to benefit all species and the ecosystem.
TMZ didn’t respect the African culture enough to even ask these questions.
Next, Donald Jr. points out, the leopard they hunted in Zimbabwe was not endangered, and they didn’t hunt any of the animals in an unethical way.
As for the legality of the hunt, the Director-General of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, V. Chadenga, published a letter on March 27 in which he called the charges against the Trump’s “baseless” and said, “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump hunted legally during their visit to Zimbabwe.” He also noted there was never an “investigation” of the Trump’s hunt and that they hunted with a “registered outfitter” and were accompanied by “game rangers.”
Nevertheless, when presented with these facts, TMZ shrugged. They’d done their dirty business. They didn’t retract the stories or print the truth.
“Very few reported the truth,” says Donald Jr. “The hit piece was news to them, but the facts that later eroded the sensationalistic story weren’t worth their ink.”
So now you’re probably wondering how the sons of Donald Trump Sr., who grew up in Manhattan, became hunters anyway? Were they indeed just rich kids after a bloody thrill?
Donald Trump Sr., doesn’t hunt and, according to Donald Jr., “really doesn’t understand why Eric and I hunt. However, he is open minded and so always allowed us to go hunting.”
Their grandfather actually introduced them to hunting, fishing and shooting. “Our maternal grandfather was Czechoslovakian. When we were young he would have us to his place in Czechoslovakia for a month or more during summers,” says Donald Jr. “He loved to hunt and fish and taught us how.”
Their grandfather died when Donald Jr. was just 12 years old, but he “got us started right,” says Donald Jr., who next found teachers in his boarding school—The Hill School in Pottstown, Pa.—who liked to hunt upland birds and more. Later, when he attended the University of Pennsylvania, he’d jump in a car every fall weekend to drive to his parent’s place in upstate New York where he’d hunt with a bow for deer.
Hunting was actually essential to Trump Jr.’s moral development as a conservationist.
“Anyone who thinks hunters are just ‘bloodthirsty morons’ hasn’t looked into hunting,” says Donald Jr. “If you wait through long, cold hours in the November woods with a bow in your hands hoping a buck will show or if you spend days walking in the African bush trailing Cape buffalo while listening to lions roar, you’re sure to learn hunting isn’t about killing. Nature actually humbles you. Hunting forces a person to endure, to master themselves, even to truly get to know the wild environment. Actually, along the way, hunting and fishing makes you fall in love with the natural world. This is why hunters so often give back by contributing to conservation.”
That’s Donald Jr.’s point of view. So when TMZ ran a quote saying the Trump’s safari “was truly a pitiful testimony to their lack of character and compassion,” Donald Jr. was left shaking his head.
“Look,” says Donald Jr., “I live and work in Manhattan. I get that many people don’t get hunting. I’ve been friends with people here for 15 years before finding out they’re also hunters, as those who do hunt often keep it to themselves. But, you know, when I was growing up and other people I knew were getting into trouble, I was somewhere in a deer stand or going to bed early so I could be up before dawn to hunt turkeys. My love of the outdoors kept me solid.”
That’s a point of view the mainstream media wasn’t open-minded enough to even look into. Or perhaps TMZ just isn’t worldly enough to know this other point of view exists. Maybe they are so insular they don’t know to balance In Defense of Animals’ viewpoint with someone from a sportsmen’s conservation group.
Maybe ignorance is a fundamental reason; however, another reason for the knee-jerk, full-blown character assassination was certainly that the Trump boys are from one of the leading families in America. (TMZ wouldn’t have bothered attacking the 18,000 or so non-celebrities that Safari Club International says travel to Africa to hunt each year.)
Or perhaps, the central reason lies deeper than TMZ’s bent for destroying celebrities. Maybe many in the media simply don’t think the sons of Donald Trump Sr. should be killing their own meat, not in the 21st century. After all, the Trumps are men other men want to be. If the protectors of the politically correct status quo don’t turn their noses up at this, well then, hunting could catch on. There might soon be Ernest Hemingway wannabes showing up in pop culture everywhere. That can’t be allowed to happen, as men such as that would shoot holes in TMZ’s worldview. They had to condemn the Trumps, to mock them, to drive their hunting lifestyle right out of polite society.
After all, there is a real danger of this becoming a trend. Recently GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons was shown in video shooting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe. And Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg updated his profile page by saying he’d killed a goat and a pig.
The possibility of hunting becoming trendy must be frightening the PETA types right out of their “F**k Fur” t-shirts. They’d thought this old-school type of man had been stomped into extinction—or at least excommunicated to the backwaters of civilization. Those manly, gun-owning, animal-killing macho men with the trophy heads in their dens and the oiled Holland & Holland double rifles in their cabinets are supposed to be extinct. They’d killed such types with modern, politically correct sensibilities, with new green awareness and effeminizing social norms.
Ah, now we get to the last and most important point: By attacking instead of trying to understand people like Donald Jr., TMZ and more are harming the environment. Let me explain.
Money from traveling hunters is used to benefit Africa’s wildlife. Conservation tools such as Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE program make sure that the money hunters spend goes to benefit local peoples, so they can buy seeds, clothe their kids and more.
National Geographic has acknowledged how much regulated hunting benefits wildlife. In the November 2007 issue National Geographic reported: “The great irony is that many species might not survive at all were it not for hunters trying to kill them.” As for Africa, National Geographic reported in March 2007: “Trophy hunting is of key importance to conservation in Africa by creating [financial] incentives to promote and retain wildlife as a land use over vast areas….”
National Geographic also noted: “According to a recent study, in the 23 African countries that allow sport hunting, 18,500 tourists pay over $200 million (U.S.) a year to hunt lions, leopards, elephants, warthogs…. Private hunting operations in these countries control more than 540,000 square miles (1.4 million square kilometers) of land, the study also found. That’s 22 percent more land than is protected by national parks.”
Donald Jr. could have told them, too. He says, “Without hunting dollars, the local populations would simply decimate the wildlife populations for food; however, because they don’t want to lose the hunting dollars, they view the game animals as a resource they can benefit from. Hunting is literally saving these wildlife populations. The locals have a vested financial interest in maintaining the game populations. But few of the media outlets that attacked us wanted to print any of that true story, as it runs counter to mainstream misperceptions.”
TMZ simply wanted to tear the Trumps to shreds, not to look into a true Theodore Roosevelt-style conservation ethic that’s now benefiting wildlife all over the world. That’s a shame, because conservation and wildlife management would benefit from a lot more honesty from the mainstream media and from environmentalists in general.
Link to the Forbes Article
