Well I'm not well known, but I have an opinion and I would tend to agree with you.

In a real survival situation, any game is fair game, but while practicing one's survival skills, when one's life isn't at stake, there seems to me to be no sense in killing a threatened species at all.

And seriously, I can't imagine an area of the world in which one would train that is populated only by endangered species and no other food source. If there is such a place, and seeing how animals are animals and some tend to act like others the world over, it seems to me one could just practice in another locale. I could be wrong, though.

Now I could see instances where killing an endangered species while practicing survival skills might be accidental, especially in passive forms of hunting such as snaring and trapping and in passive forms of fishing such as gill netting and running trot lines, but still one can do their best to avoid the possibility.

There's a survival school I read about that, during practice and/or training exercises, uses catch and release methods. The trainees after a successful catch are allotted a certain amount of calories in the form of food that is brought along on the exercise. Similarly, when being taught more active forms of hunting they use targets and allotted food for "hits"

While training, if one is alone, the above may not be possible due to extra weight, but still I imagine there would be a way or two around the killing of endangered species for the sake of training.

To me, killing an endangered species while training because it is "realistic", strikes me as similar to a police officer practicing his marksmanship on real people instead of silhouettes because it's "realistic". Of course I'm making an assumption that this whole thing is based somehow in placing one's self in as realistic a situation as possible. I could be way off base on the person's motivations here.

That's just my take. As always, I could be wrong.

I'm not even going to ask who the person in question is though... Even if such mysteries make me nutz... <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />