Sorry your dad is an idiot. At least it sounds hopeful that you didn’t inherit his “intelligence.”

That's stupid logic. If there are enough of an animal to be in a video, it must mean there are plenty of them. QED.

I wonder if he's referring to how animal reserves sometimes let hunters pay for the privilege to hunt exotic creatures. Cost something like 50k to legally hunt a single elephant on some reserves. That money then goes back into the reserve letting them create a safe environment to breed even more elephants. As long as there are people willing to pay that kind of money to hunt elephants there will be elephants. And since this is largely outside the U.S in developing countries that 50k is like 6 years wages.

Well, IDEALLY, hunters are part of larger preservation movements, and work on hunting in very specific times and ways so they actually help keep the population going--both by doing things like providing artificial ecosystems and by thinning the population at times. However, the term for someone who hunts an animal on the endangered species list is 'poacher', and no, they do not do any of the above.