Beach Boys at Safari Club International

Thank you, Cam.

Full-out appalled. Sorry if it sounds like I’m being just a little political but Mike’s support for Donald Trump back at the last US election was unfortunate, but this is heartbreaking. What has possessed them to play this gig? (Yeah, I know, dollars, but…)

This is a slippery slope in the USA to try to dictate what work someone can or cannot/should or should not accept. It would be OK if they were playing for Planned Parenthood, who tout that they are performing women’s “health care,” and have not one cancer screening mammogram machine in their network, for women’s health and who dismember and harvest organs from aborted fetuses and sell to the highest bidder, no less than the organ harvesting from the Yighurs or Falun Gong in China and organ trafficking elsewhere?   

There are a lot of inequities.  If it was a car show - someone would complain about an internal combustion engine.  They would be shamed for climate change or global warming or the hole in the ozone.  

While hunting is not my thing, I have no problem with the fishing aspect, and the concept of it as a family event.  And, I’m more concerned with humans, who it seems, are no longer politically correct.

Where there are exploding populations of wildlife - like turkeys or geese in the cities, or the protected overpopulation of waterfowl, fouling the lakes and waterways, (which could be culled to feed the millions of those with food insecurity) and, where a kid can’t play on a playground; coyotes and disease-carrying, raccoons everywhere - I have no problem “thinning the herd.”  

Shaming entertainers to decline work because they don’t agree with the theme of the convention or have TDS? Or, suggest they breach a contract because some don’t agree with the event?   

If people want hunting (or fishing which is a part of this event) to stop - there is a way to do that.  File legislation and get support for it.  I think that this has just gone too far.  It is an event - for a sport that is now legal.  If people want it to not be legal - make that happen with laws.  Bullying entertainers with social media - rather than legislation? I just think is the wrong way to go. There are strong feelings with this and I don’t expect much agreement on this, but that is ok. I’m looking at some of the legal aspects of being able to choose the work you do.

Fight for your cause - or legal change, not to control what another person does for work.   JMHO  

And if were anyone else sponsoring the event - no one would care.  But they are DJT’s sons.  Whatever else the sons are involved in - they have raised over $16 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital which treats and researches childhood cancer.  They were forced to give up that charitable work when their father went to the White House.  So the hospital has to find ways of making up that money.  No family gets a bill for care in that hospital.  You never hear what good things people do - only magnify whatever people don’t agree with.  The optics are bad - I will agree, but the hunting aspect is not the whole story.   

Cam - I have no knowledge of the intricacies of any of that - this (St. Jude) was not their charity. Those organizations generally oversee any fundraising meeting with volunteers- going over every detail.  The event, the venue, press releases, ticket sales, all of it.  

A while back I co-chaired a fundraiser for a similar charity (also a national one) and everything was overseen by them. And at the end of the night we handed them the check.   

Thanks - above my pay grade! There must have been some expectation that the golf course would be comped.  The venue we used, did not comp, either (although we did get a lot of donations) and the ticket had to allow dinner coverage along with the donation. I can tell you that it was easily six months of part-time work to make the event I was involved in, a success.  Eric has donated a lot of money to St. Jude for pediatric cancer research, regardless of the “creative accounting” that may have gone down.  

Tragically, a lot of organizations with non-profit status, have come to look like money-laundering industries with big salaries at the top.  Not living wages, but “living large” salaries.  Thanks again, for that article.    

Odd, bearing in mind they have played pro-environmental gigs and have been vocal about such issues. Money talks - or maybe they think some of the Charlie Daniels band fame will rub off on them...

Didn’t sign. I won’t boycott the Beach Boys. Just like I wouldn’t boycott an old friend if he belonged to SCI.

That said, I *hope* they withdraw from it. But that’s as far as I’ll go.

It is more important to ban trophy hunting than to boycott a band. I do hope The Beach Boys cancel.

You’re all over the political aspect in conservation. So dishonest.  As well as all these wild fires in areas where there has been no forestry maintenance, allowing underbrush to accumulate and slow burn un-noticed. We can learn from global ancestors...

 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/20202/Jan/11/how-first-australians-ancient-knowledge-can-help-us-survive-the-bushfires-of-the-future

If it does happen, for whatever reason, maybe all performance fee could be donated to a animal conservancy group other than SCI.

The change.org petition photo at the top was two of the Trump sons. A trigger.  Yes, they are involved but the organization has nothing on their site with that photo. This looks like a googled photo to whip up a media narrative.  This man has an organization against trophy hunting and appears to be exploiting this event to raise his own organization’s profile. It looks more political than anything. He is not some anonymous animal activist.  He is a pro doing opposition activism.

It is his business and he is a professional lobbyist.  I wonder what his salary is. He worked as a House of Commons researcher, Communications Director for a group working for former Prime Minister Tony Blair.  He is not an unpaid volunteer. I agree with a lot of his positions but he is no amateur, setting up this petition.       

That photo does not appear anywhere in their online literature that I could find. There are 50k members and 180 chapters.  I wonder how many bothered to read any of the positions of the organization or knew the background of the person who started it, before they signed the petition.

Or their (SCI) conservation efforts bringing almost extinct species back from the brink and re-populated (some back to the nuisance scale.) Wild turkeys for one! 

This is a self-serving hit - plain and simple, using the band, and their popularity, to garner attention before some big political events this week.  And sully the reputation of the band. They are just collateral damage for him. And a tool to raise his own profile and agenda. 

The SCI organization is not centered on trophy hunting.  In fact it traces hunting as the survival skill going back to the beginning of mankind.  Part of what they (SCI) raise goes for anti-poaching. (Ivory from elephants, etc. ) It looks like a false representation of what the organization’s prime goals are.

And, I hope they (SCI) sue him into oblivion. I don’t agree with trophy hunting, because I think it is stupid, to go anywhere near a beast that could eat you for a snack, but this is not that.  It is political.  

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Not signing the petition because I'm not actually going to boycott them and I'm not going to lie about stuff like that, but I do hope they pull out (though I imagine if they did so this close to the event there would be a massive kill fee, no pun intended).
As for it being against the members' convictions -- it's entirely possible that they have no idea what they've been booked for, or wouldn't have had til this blew up. I get the impression that they take any gig that will pay their fee, pretty much.