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Poaching behind worst African elephant losses in 25 years
- JKCalhoun 10y agoI'm an idiot here, so allow me this uninformed suggestion: Could the elephant's tusks be removed and replaced with false tusks? I'm assuming there would be some way to replace them the way an implant is used to replace a tooth in a human. If the prosthetic tusk were obvious (a bright color for example) it would signal to the would-be poacher, "No ivory here." The tusks removed would be destroyed.
- sliverstorm 10y agoAny scheme like this results in poachers killing the elephant so they don't wind up wasting time tracking it again later. I think this was discovered when they poisoned rhino horns (ground rhino horn is a traditional oral medicine) and marked them with bright color to identify them as poisoned. Poachers killed the marked rhinos and left the horns.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoThis suggests the obvious approach of poisoning the horn without dying it. Did anyone try that?
- csallen 10y agoThat's a very interesting ethical question. Maybe the better solution is to poison all the horns, but mark them as well.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoPoachers don't have to kill the animals just to save themselves time in the future. If you mark the horns, you leave yourself wide open to poachers killing the animals to get you to stop doing that.
- csallen 10y agoWell, considering the poachers' current strategy is already to kill as many animals as possible, I don't think that would be an effective move on their part. It's basically just the status quo, except now poachers are just wasting their time/ammo/money and not getting anything out of it.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoGood point.
- ericjang 10y agoAlong the subject of ethics... what about poisoning all the horns... but not marking them?
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoHow would that help? No one would know it was poisoned until the rhino was dead. The poachers wouldn't even find out until people stopped buying rhino horn because it was killing uneducated, superstitious people thousands of miles away - which is to say, far far too late. The loss of the rhino and the elephant would be tragic, but those people who consume it do not deserve to die - they don't understand what they're doing or what they're causing, and they are worth more than rhinos. Edit, since I can't respond to your comment: There is already an information battle to convince people that traffic in and using rhino horn is not possibly good for them. If they will not believe scientists telling them that, they won't believe it's poisoned. Nothing short of a mass market and culture shift is likely to change their beliefs. Telling them it's poisoned would certainly have too many misses and too little reach to be acceptable.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> How would that help? No one would know it was poisoned until the rhino was dead. The poachers wouldn't even find out until people stopped buying rhino horn because it was killing uneducated, superstitious people thousands of miles away. You would tell them. How do people currently know that rubbing alcohol has been poisoned? > Edit, since I can't respond to your comment: There is already an information battle to convince people that traffic in and using rhino horn is not possibly good for them. If they will not believe scientists telling them that, they won't believe it's poisoned. Nothing short of a mass market and culture shift is likely to change their beliefs. Telling them it's poisoned would certainly have too many misses and too little reach to be acceptable. 1. Yes, you can respond to any comment on its own page. 2. Yes, if the horns are actually poisoned, people will learn that they're poisoned. The feedback loop here is quite short: you announce that you've poisoned the rhino horns, people scoff, say "they'd never have the guts", and eat the horns, and then a lot of those people die. Word will get around. If they're not poisoned, then of course people won't believe that, but it's hard to blame them for accurately not believing your self-serving lies.
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- gozur88 10y agoIf all the horns were taken there would be no point in killing elephants (or rhinos) to avoid tracking problems.
- Spare_account 10y agoRemoval sounds a little invasive but various schemes for sabotaging elephant tusk and rhino born have been proposed over the years. https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/thorny_issues/dyeing_rhino_horn_and_elephant_ivory https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/thorny_issues/dyeing...
- wehadfun 10y agoVariations of this come up all the time. Last reply I heard to this came down to. The difficulty of actually sedating the elephant. The danger of the elephants waking up during tusks removal and hurting them self or the remover. Poachers would still kill the elephant to avoid needlessly tracking it
- melling 10y agoWonder if this is related to the rise of China's economy.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoI thought China had brought in a total ban (finally) on both import and sale last year. Obviously there's still smuggling, but I'd hoped the ban would have a noticeably positive effect.
- adamnemecek 10y agoIIRC I read somewhere that the initial result were positive but we have to wait a bit for the markets to respond to the change.
- undersuit 10y ago>but I'd hoped the ban would have a noticeably positive effect. The US bans and controls the sale of a lot of drugs, all we've got 50 years later is another out of control government department.
- throwawy92616 10y agoOf course China is a factor. Since Mao killed all of the intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, China has lost morality and knows only the ethics of greed and material wealth. With globalization they gained money, and unrestrained by ethics black markets flourish in China, fueled by the nouveau riche.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> Since Mao killed all of the intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, China has lost morality That didn't help, but I think throwing the whole country into desperate, starving poverty was a much larger contributor.
- msie 10y ago> Since Mao killed all of the intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, China has lost morality There are people protesting this in China and China banned trade of ivory. So don't damn the entire nation.
- M_Grey 10y agoCall me cold, but this strikes me as a situation that can be managed by altering the risk:reward landscape of poaching. Shoot people on sight who are poaching, and greatly increase the number of game wardens.
- wnevets 10y agoIsnt that what's already happening in some areas?
- ifdefdebug 10y agoit is, and they shoot back. so stakes are high already.
- M_Grey 10y agoHence: "Greatly increase the number of game wardens." At some point the risk vs. reward gets skewed in the elephant's favor, and as a bonus you're employing people who might otherwise be in a militia or mercenary group.
- M_Grey 10y agoIt is, but typically it's a local affair, undertrained, understaffed, and underfunded. For the sake of saving a possibly intelligent species, we could afford to pool a bit of money and manpower and make it less of a fight and more of a slaughter of the poachers.
- Bud 10y agoThis is a good strategy. I think it'd be even more effective if large bounties were offered for the body parts of poachers. Macabre, yet, somehow fitting.
- cglace 10y agoSounds like you should run for president of the Philippines.
- majani 10y agoDon't know why this is on HN, but as a Kenyan I'll say this: the Kenyan elephant situation is absolutely hopeless. It has been well documented since the 70s that the head honcho in poaching was the then president's wife, and the current president's mother(same woman though) [1]. For obvious reasons, this means absolutely nothing will ever be done about poaching in Kenya. If you like Kenya's elephants, best to just go see them before they become extinct, and don't waste any money on charities that claim to be solving this problem. I am not being cynical at all. 3rd world politics is just that depressing and hopeless. Feudalism disguised with democracy paint. [1] http://mavulture.com/political-corruption/mother-of-the-nation-who-led-plunder-of-beloved-motherland/ http://mavulture.com/political-corruption/mother-of-the-nati...
- dfsegoat 10y agoThanks for that interesting history - had no idea that corruption was that high up the chain. But I do also second your question: Why is this on HN? It is pretty common knowledge that overhunting + poaching and poor game management are the primary reason for the loss of megafauna on the African contient. edit: People thought my first statement was snark - it isn't. I genuinely had no idea that poaching / corruption was that high up the chain.
- lucozade 10y agoI think your first statement answers your question.
- dfsegoat 10y agoReally? I don't. I don't find that something which is common knowledge - that poaching + habitat loss is the single driving force behind the loss of African (and other) megafauna - to be news. We (zoologists) have known this for a long, long time.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoHacker News is not centered on zoologists. A lot of the comments that I really hope to provoke informed responses with just go unresponded to, because (I assume) they are in the area of linguistics and the HN population doesn't have a lot to say about that. Similarly, the bar for "interesting material from zoology" is lower here than it might be in a zoological journal.
- olegious 10y agoMy thought has always been that poaching is a economic problem and requires an economic solution. The reason why elephants are being killed is because they're worth more dead than alive to the poacher and likely the local community or otherwise the local community would do more to protect the animals from poachers. What if there was a fund that paid local communities for each live elephant? The community now has an incentive to prevent poaching. I suppose some of the foreseeable side effects could be the community preventing elephant migration in order to increase the local numbers, but these types of details could be worked out.
- Havoc 10y ago>My thought has always been that poaching is a economic problem and requires an economic solution. Sure. Problem is the economic problem is...well Africa sized. You're not going to fix that any time soon. Plus Asia sized as well...a fair amount of the drive is coming from there esp on the rhino poaching side.
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoProbably there will be no more elephants in 25 years, except for small numbers in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries in developed countries. At the rate it is going, African wildlife will largely disappear even as the human population explodes. Already there are over 1.2 billion humans on the continent, and not enough food, not enough stability or prosperity. Bush meat is popular and can be bought anywhere, which of course means people are hunting and eating protected species. There are a couple hundred thousand chimpanzees left in Africa; there were once millions. There are maybe 20,000 lions, down from half a million. There were once millions of African elephants; now they're down to half a million and still dropping. Many other species are facing similar fates. We humans are like a blight on this planet. Maybe we should quickly develop extraterrestrial colonization technologies, get the population off world, and preserve the Earth as a giant animal sanctuary.
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- savagej 10y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8g-lugXGBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8g-lugXGBQ
- jna_sh 10y agoThere's a state sponsored hackathon series coming up, to create solutions to tackle the demand of ivory and other illicitly poached animal goods. Worth contributing to if you care about this cause: http://www.zoohackathon.com/ http://www.zoohackathon.com/
- cyberferret 10y agoI read another article recently that had a picture of a huge pile of illegally poached tusks being burnt in a large pyre. I wondered about the logic of doing this. Wouldn't destroying a large number of tusks just increase the scarcity and thus the value, thus incentivising more poachers to kill more elephants? Burning the tusks wouldn't bring the elephants back to life. I would have thought instead that suddenly flooding the market with tons of cheap ivory would kill the value and reduce profit for distributors. Then again, it would probably spur demand when people see the increase in availability?!? No easy answer, but at the crux of it, we have to remove the almighty Dollar (oh, ok - Schilling) from the whole equation somehow.
- nradov 10y agoThe Foundation for Wildlife and Habitat Conservation - Zambia is doing some great work on promoting alternatives to poaching. Your donations will do a lot of good there. http://fwhc.net/ http://fwhc.net/
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- ceor4 10y agoI really wish ivory wasn't confiscated and burnt, but rather was infused with poison and released to continue to its eventual destination.
- emptybits 10y agoI know this is politically naive but I'll say it. Self-declared police nations (like USA & UK & France & their allies) are so quick to intervene in Not Their Country when issues like oil or political alliances are at stake. So can we see the same level of committment (e.g. military intervention) when large scale extinction events or environmental devastation are at stake? Soldiers lives are precious. So this is easy for me to say, but would we really be putting much at stake to drop a peacekeeping (read: anti-poacher) presence into Kenya?
- partycoder 10y agoThe problem is that Chinese use Ivory figures as traditional gifts, and they will not ban them, just in the same way the Spanish won't ban bullfighting. This increases the cost of ivory, which places a high reward for elephant tusks, which translates into their death sentence. Likewise high end pianos, billiard balls, and such, make use of ivory. According to surveys, the majority Chinese believe that elephant tusks grow back in the same way nails do, and they do not know that elephants need to be killed in the process. At least there are studies to make use of synthetic ivory. Now, the use of ivory itself doesn't respond to any actual need other than a cultural one. Many materials that are cheaper can replace ivory in most use cases.
- gozur88 10y agoIf ivory is a Veblen good, efforts to raise the price might actually stimulate demand instead of reducing it.
- Maarten88 10y agoI was in Tanzania last summer and saw elephants in one of these parks where poaching is a big problem. We were lucky to see them; it was beautiful. Our guides told us that natural selection causes elephants there to grow ever smaller tusks, making them less attractive to poaching. That seemed somewhat hopeful to me: maybe evolution will happen fast enough so they can re-bounce in numbers after they produce no ivory anymore.
- cyberferret 10y agoOr else the smaller tusks will mean poachers kill more elephants each hunt to meet their ivory tonnage criteria?!? Could be a double edged sword. I heard on a podcast recently that the main cause of elephant deaths in the 1920's and 1930's was.... the manufacturing of billiard balls. Apparently it took roughly 2 elephants worth of tusks to manufacture one set of ivory billiard/snooker balls. Astounding - whereas a piano keyboard would usually only take up less than 1/2 a tusk because they used laminated sheets of ivory. At least we can be thankful that the modern plastics industry was born out of the need to create 'artificial ivory' billiard balls which exhibited the same bounce and noise properties. Although one could argue that modern plastics are a whole ecological blight in their own right...
- GuiA 10y ago> Our guides told us that natural selection causes elephants there to grow ever smaller tusks Huuuuuh... scientific source on that? Seems like an extremely specious claim, given the life span of elephants, and the fact that poachers are probably happy to harvest ivory even if the elephant has slightly smaller tusks.
- SticksAndBreaks 10y agoLets look at africa, then look at medieval japan. Two cultures, two times limited ressources (wilderness - forrests). One time, the allmend ressources are managed and tight self-controll is established over society - even during times of warfare and strife. Why does this not work in africa?
- undersuit 10y agoMedieval Japan didn't have many opportunities to engage in global trade. Oh and what happened to their feudal system once they were exposed to international products?
- SticksAndBreaks 10y agoEh, they transfered it into a cooperate-feudal system, where your feudal Lord is your cooperations CEO?