Animal rights group persuades El Al airlines to stop shipping hunting trophies

Shlomi Amshalom (El Al): The airline’s employees love nature, animals and protecting the environment. We have no doubt that this is the right course of action.

HAGAY HACOHEN: Aaron Raby of Los Angeles will no longer be able to use El Al to fly home his hunting trophies from the remains of an elephant he killed legally in South Africa after a US NGO appealed to the airline to halt the practice, an organization official has told The Jerusalem Post. El Al had joined some 40 other airlines in banning the shipping of hunting trophies on their aircraft, said Kent Stein, corporate-responsibility officer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

PETA had sent El Al a video showing Raby shooting repeatedly at a young elephant, which cried out in pain before it died. Raby later posted images on social media of the elephant’s remains that were to be preserved and shipped to the US as trophies and of him eating the elephant’s meat. The animal was killed outside the unfenced Kruger National Park, where hunting is illegal, PETA said.

Raby, who openly shared his views on hunting on social media, as well as visual materials from his global hunting trips, has told the Los Angeles Times that as hunting is a legal activity, he does not understand the outcry. “We pay a lot of money to hunt these animals,” Raby told the paper. “If we didn’t hunt, that land would be converted into cattle ranches, and there’d be poaching. They don’t want lions killing their cattle or elephants destroying their crops”…

Stein and PETA thanked El Al for its swift response. In a letter, El Al CEO Gonen Usishkin said the airline would no longer ship the remains of hunted animals… El Al chief of staff Shlomi Amshalom told the Post the airline’s employees love nature, animals and protecting the environment. “The moment this topic came to our attention, we had no doubt on what was the right course of action,” he said. SOURCE…

RELATED VIDEO: