This Sickening Reason Is Why You Should Never Buy Food from Jimmy John's Again! by Lara Starr

“Some companies should be BOYCOTTED for various reasons. JIMMY JOHN'S is ABSOLUTELY one of them. And no, this isn’t about many of the issues people are always talking about when it comes to working for Jimmy John’s either, like the fact that they force their sick employees to work for fear of losing their jobs. And if they get fired or quit, they’re not allowed to work at any sandwich shop or restaurant within a three mile radius of a Jimmy John’s either… (Read about all that here).

“No. Today we’re talking about the owner, Jimmy John Liautaud himself, who is a complete… psychopath who loves to spend your sandwich money on killing endangered animals in Africa.

“Jimmy comes to South Africa (and sometimes Namibia or Botswana) quite frequently. When he does, he easily drops more than a quarter million dollars on a single trophy hunt. Like on this trip, when 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!

“…So how does it work? Well, usually the animals are lured from a national park on to private property. Trophy hunters will leave out bait, play the sounds of other animals to lure them in, or a few other tactics to find their animal victims. Canned hunting is even worse. It is the ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ version of trophy hunting. The animals are often hand raised so they are tame and don’t run away. They leave food out for them one day, then some coward creeps up and shoots them with a high powered bow or rifle. Sometimes they don’t even have to creep. Sometimes they 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…

“Part of the infuriating thing about this behavior is the fact that people like Jimmy have the audacity to call themselves ‘conservationists’ and claim that their trophy hunts benefit conservation and local communities. Real conservationists give their time and money without insisting on killing something in return…

“Jimmy is absolutely full of crap when he claims that trophy hunting funds conservation, feeds starving villages or keeps the ecosystem in balance by keeping animal numbers down. Those are 100% lies perpetuated by the trophy hunting industry, and they’re easily disproved.

“It is well known here that trophy hunting funds less than 2% of our conservation efforts in South Africa. Normal tourism (as in shooting animals with cameras only) raises over 15x more money for conservation than any form of trophy hunting in Africa does, without brutally killing anything. 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 can’t 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...

“Ecosystems need to be better protected, especially fragile ones that are so out of balance due to over hunting, poaching and habitat loss, like the African bush… In case there is some doubt about… conservation, you can read a much more in depth explanation here: The Myth of Trophy Hunting as Conservation”

From This Sickening Reason Is Why You Should Never Buy Food from Jimmy John’s Again! by Lara Starr, Journalist, Activist and Researcher