Trophy Hunting
Introduction

Trophy hunting is the practice of hunting animals (legally and illegally) for the purpose of preserving a part of their body. Hunting for food is one thing, but killing an animal in the name of "sport" is just sickening. There are two main types: the hunting of stable species, and the hunting of rare and exotic animals.
Trophy hunting is different than hunting for food, because the trophy hunter's top priority is to have a good looking trophy, and that means aiming away from some vital organs (like the brain, and anything in the chest area, like the heart and lungs), causing the animal to bleed profusely. People don't always get it on the first shot, so the animal suffers horribly before it dies. The kind of person who trophy hunts obviously doesn't care about the well-being if animals.
Unfortunately, most of the animals that are being hunted by Americans in this way live in parts of the world like Africa and Asia and that makes it harder to control. The law is: if it was legal to kill it in the country you killed it in, then it's legal to import it into the US. Tragically, most of these countries do not have adequate laws/law enforcement to protect their indigenous species.

Who Does It?

Anyone can hunt deer or birds when in season, since it doesn't cost much and is not regulated, but hunting rare and exotic species (mostly found in the the continents of Asia and Africa) is an extremely expensive undertaking. A hunter can be charged $200-800 or more per day (depending on the type of game being hunted). This typically includes the arrangement for the required permits, transportation, accommodation, meals, laundry, use of a hunting vehicle, trackers, skinners and the field preparation of trophies and their transport to a taxidermist. They can charge additional money for alcohol, ammunition and taxidermy (and sometimes permits, though this is not always the case, and that would fall under Poaching if they did not acquire a permit).
In America, rare and exotic trophy hunting is run by a few very powerful clubs. One of the biggest is the Safari Club International, which has been fighting enviromental protection laws and often winning.

How Do Some People Benefit from these Excursions?

The most prevalent of the laws protecting threatened animals is The Endangered Species Act, which states that animal trophies may be imported for scientific research, enhancement of propagation, or survival of a species. The term enhancement has begun to include some endangered species, and animal trophies are being smuggled across the border in the guise of scientific research.
Enhancement of propagation also includes museums. After the National Museum of Natural History accepted a 20 million dollar donation from a big-game hunter named Kenneth Behring in 1997, requested a permit to import some extremely rare sheep, of which only 100 still exist, that were shot on a safari. After some bad publicity, it dropped the permit. This type of case is not uncommon, and many museums have fessed up to acquiring their stuffed animals from big-game hunters. Big-time hunters can benefit from their excursions in making their home a walk-in museum; thus getting tax cuts. The IRS gives tax breaks to millionaires, who go overseas to shoot animals, if they give the animals to museums like the Smithsonian.

Trophy Poachers are driven by pure greed. There is enormous profit in bringing in rare and endangered animals such as lions, rhinoceros, elephants, leopards, cheetahs, gorillas, and some reptiles, and trading them on the black market. In addition to hunting animals in wildlife preserves, animals are also lured out of reserves or drugged and then shot by trophy hunters.

Someone may ask the question, Why is there such a huge demand for these animals? This can be explained in only one-way: lack of education on the part of the buyers. One of the main reasons for the demand for rare animals is that their body parts hold sacred meaning and medicinal purposes for certain traditional medicines. Lions are increasingly hunted for their bones, to be used in Chinese Medicine. They are hunted as a replacement for tiger bones, which are now difficult to come by. This is a multi-million dollar trade, and it exists all around the world. Most traditional remedies can be bought under-the-counter, even in the U.S.A. Africa and Asia are the prime consumers for this kind of industry.

The second major demand for these animals is probably most well known: The Fur Industry. All too many a leopard or a zebra or an ocelot has been killed for its luxurious coat. This industry is as plain and simple as you can get. People who wear furs may know about where the fur came from, but they probably don't care. People like the touch and look of fur on them. Leopard print is now a popular favorite for practically anything, but no one stops to think that once there were actual leopard coats on jackets and pants. This used to be legal in the US, but has now been outlawed. Faux Fur is a relatively recent invention, but real fur is still thought of as more desirable by some.