Hunting animals to save them?

You don't have to go to Africa to hunt exotic animals. In fact, Texas may have more of some endangered exotics than live in the wild. That's because breeding them is a billion dollar business in Texas, where over 100 species roam large ranches and can be hunted for sport. The hunters and the ranchers they pay to hunt the trophy animals say the money generated by hunting these animals is helping to save them. They claim only 10 percent of any species can be killed annually. But to animal rights people fighting to shut them down, they're nothing more than slaughter houses. Lara Logan reports on this little known practice on "60 Minutes" Sunday, Jan. 29 at 7 p.m. ET/PT. It all began decades ago, when ranchers took in surplus animals, some endangered in the wild, from zoos. Now there are more than 250,000 exotics living on ranches, mostly in Texas, in a business that supports 14,000 jobs. "That's why these animals thrive...because of that value they have to the hunting community," says Charly Seale, a rancher and executive director of the Exotic Wildlife Association in Texas. Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, an international animal rights organization, believes such rationale is "ludicrous. I think it's immoral," she tells Logan. "They are saying it's an act of conservation and that's lunacy," says Feral, who would rather them not exist in Texas than thrive on a ranch there purely as prey for sportsmen. "I don't think you create a life to shoot it."...more