Is Kendall Jones, the 19 year old currently enrolled at Texas Tech in Lubbock, and studying marketing and sports therapy there, a killer or a conservator?
Or is she just a teenager that likes to hunt big game because she grew up doing so? She’s also a cheerleader at her University and is in her sophomore year at the Lubbock campus. Since she began posting photos on her Facebook page of animals she had a hand in either tranquilizing for conservation efforts or actually shooting and killing, for what she also considers to be to the benefit of conservation, she has been maligned and threatened because of her beliefs.
In the above picture this rhinoceros is tranquilized, and while out had blood drawn from him to be added to a DNA databank to be utilized in anti-poaching campaigns, but on various sites across the Internet where this picture was re-shared, a lot of people were saying that Kendall had killed the beast merely for sport, and a virtual mob, much as I can imagine coming after witches in Salem, was forming, ready to string this girl up without knowing any of the facts.
Even the United States Fish & Wildlife Service sets forth that hunters, and the fees in charging them to be licensed to hunt, are contributing hundreds of millions of dollars for conservation programs that benefit many wildlife species, both hunted and non- hunted. Not everyone, but more than make me comfortable to see, have virtually called for this young girl’s head to be taken and put on a spike, along with other more vivid and worrisome ideas on how she should be killed for participating in something she believes to be constructive and helpful. To deny her the benefit of the doubt that her beliefs are real and heartfelt is unconscionable and dangerous to anyone with a belief system, unlike the majority.
I am most certainly not advocating the type of hunting that she does or any other type of hunting I am simply wondering at the ease with which others are led to believe what another person believes to be true, without any proof of fact, such as those who called for the gallows when they saw the “dead” rhinoceros. It IS true that she hunts, and she has done so since a very young age, and was obviously raised in an environment that advocated the type of hunting she is doing now but has anyone stopped to question her parent’s responsibility other than to call her a spoiled rich bitch? Then again, what gives any of us the right to tell someone else what they believe to be a help, and a means to prolong a species existence, that they are wrong, when we know very little about the history or present-day events of the area, or if they are actually sincere in their beliefs? JUST because they differ from ours? That is not a reason. That is ego. Judging is out of our domain.
I’ve heard all the stories about she’s trying to get a television deal etc. and that’s why she’s done this, but she’s had a signed development deal since January for a series on the Sportsman Channel to be produced by the PigMan, and due sometime early in 2015. Like I said, remember this girl’s major. I’m not saying that she hasn’t killed all the animals she claims to, or that she was right to if she did, I’m just saying that I think there is a whole lot more at play here than meets the eye and that even if it is exactly as you perceive it to be, other than the tranquilized animals not actually being dead, you have no right to wish such horrible things on a young girl. Karma has a long memory. Who’s to say in twenty years that because of her efforts at conservation the animal population won’t be more stable? None of us, because it’s an unproven set of facts.
Her Intentions Were Good?
Remember, the media manipulates people all the time. Did a 19-year-old girl manipulate all of you? Facebook did.