5 ms·

There aren't that many elephants left to guard, and there isn't an infinite supply of poachers. Unlike dealing drugs, for which the supply is worldwide and can

by M_Grey 10y ago

There aren't that many elephants left to guard, and there isn't an infinite supply of poachers. Unlike dealing drugs, for which the supply is worldwide and can be hidden, and for which no particular skills or guts are required, hunting elephants is not so simple or stealthy. I'm happy to attack this from both ends though.

astrodust 10y ago
Elephants aren't content to sit in one spot, they wander over considerable distances and between many different countries. This makes them a lot harder to police than, say, a captive bear. You can have all the guards in the world attached to these elephants but guards are human and they'll get lazy doing nothing. When they let themselves slip, someone will be there to take advantage of their lapse. This is a game you can't win by protecting the animals alone. You need to kill demand, you need to make the risk way, way too high for the potential payoff. One thing you could do to incentivize protecting elephants is offer a payout for a given herd. If someone poaching an elephant costs you money you'd be motivated to protect them, so long as the protection money is greater than any reward for poaching. Hopefully over time we'll have more technology based solutions like drones that can spot poachers long before they're a threat or civilians who will snitch out poachers because their livelihood is at stake.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  "Hopefully over time" will leave us with the tech and not the elephants. There's no reason not to both attack demand, and supply at the same time. Even if the result is less than perfect, delay at this point will allow for that tech you mentioned.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    I'm not in a position to shorten that time by, say, pitching a Y-Combinator start-up proposal to buy some military grade drones with thermal imaging systems and deploy these over areas with vulnerable elephant tribes, but you're welcome to try. People will Kickstarter some pretty crazy things, so maybe theres's a business to be had here. If the local authorities permit selling of naming rights, who knows how high the bidding could get.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      I'd rather invest that same money in multiple shifts of spotters and snipers, and cash bounties for middlemen.
      - astrodust 10y ago
        I don't think you recognize how big an area you have to patrol and how many threats you have to protect against. Africa is huge and the area that elephant herds wander over is perhaps as large as continental USA. It's that big. I doubt your approach would work in some place as contained as Texas. It might work in a place like Hawaii, if, say, raptor poaching at the local dinosaur exhibit was a problem.
        M_Grey 10y ago
        Elephants have a wide range, but it's not as though they teleport across that range in the dead of night. They're large, you can track their calls for miles, and they often take predictable routes for their entire lives. You don't need to protect empty land, you just need to have rotating teams covering the elephants.
        astrodust 10y ago
        Rotating teams. Replacement vehicles. Spare parts. Fuel. Food. Batteries. Crew swaps. Visas and permits. Armed guards to protect the anti-poaching crew when they might run into conflict with local militia. It's also not like elephants pick areas to travel that are particularly friendly to vehicles. Look at this track one group took from one side of Africa to the other: https://safarihorizons.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/in-the-tracks-of-giants-following-elephant-migration-routes-across-southern-africa/ https://safarihorizons.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/in-the-track... Africa is not known for having exceptionally well maintained roads, they make Russian backwoods trails look like the Autobahn, and that goes quadruple inside a nature reserve. Driving this distance in any vehicle would be absolute hell.
        10y ago
- avar 10y ago
  > This is a game you can't win by protecting the animals > alone. You need to kill demand. Why not satisfy the demand? We're not worried about the demand for chickens making them extinct, but if chickens were still delicious but it was illegal to trade them we'd surely be in the same situation with chickens facing certain extinction. Why isn't that an acceptable solution for elephants? Developed western countries sell expensive hunting tags for large animals. Are elephants stuck in some economical limbo where it's too expensive to raise them but too tempting to kill them in the wild? Or is profitable culling simply rejected out of hand for moral reasons that aren't applied to similar animals in the west (e.g. bears).
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    As far as I know you can't actually breed elephants in captivity very successfully. This link has some good info: http://right-tourism.com/2014/10/captive-elephants-arent-contributing-conservation/#sthash.XbYiA8H1.dpbs http://right-tourism.com/2014/10/captive-elephants-arent-con...
    - avar 10y ago
      I'm not talking about shooting captive elephants in zoos, but having legalized hunting in massive game reserves big enough for these animals to range in. E.g. this Radiolab episode interviews a guy who paid to hunt a black rhino, it goes into how populations of wild animals have been boosted in certain parts of Africa by massive game reserves that are run for-profit for hunting purposes: http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/
      - astrodust 10y ago
        This might be news to you but it's pretty much an open secret that most of those ranges are barely distinguishable from poaching. They work hard to justify their kills, like they'll claim an animal needs to be put down anyway, or there's an unusually large concentration of them in one spot and it's not practical to relocate them, anything to meet the base legal requirement. They give a thin veneer of legality to an otherwise illegal practice.

by M_Grey 10y ago

astrodust 10y ago

Elephants aren't content to sit in one spot, they wander over considerable distances and between many different countries. This makes them a lot harder to police than, say, a captive bear. You can have all the guards in the world attached to these elephants but guards are human and they'll get lazy doing nothing. When they let themselves slip, someone will be there to take advantage of their lapse. This is a game you can't win by protecting the animals alone. You need to kill demand, you need to make the risk way, way too high for the potential payoff. One thing you could do to incentivize protecting elephants is offer a payout for a given herd. If someone poaching an elephant costs you money you'd be motivated to protect them, so long as the protection money is greater than any reward for poaching. Hopefully over time we'll have more technology based solutions like drones that can spot poachers long before they're a threat or civilians who will snitch out poachers because their livelihood is at stake.

M_Grey 10y ago
"Hopefully over time" will leave us with the tech and not the elephants. There's no reason not to both attack demand, and supply at the same time. Even if the result is less than perfect, delay at this point will allow for that tech you mentioned.
- astrodust 10y ago
  I'm not in a position to shorten that time by, say, pitching a Y-Combinator start-up proposal to buy some military grade drones with thermal imaging systems and deploy these over areas with vulnerable elephant tribes, but you're welcome to try. People will Kickstarter some pretty crazy things, so maybe theres's a business to be had here. If the local authorities permit selling of naming rights, who knows how high the bidding could get.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    I'd rather invest that same money in multiple shifts of spotters and snipers, and cash bounties for middlemen.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      I don't think you recognize how big an area you have to patrol and how many threats you have to protect against. Africa is huge and the area that elephant herds wander over is perhaps as large as continental USA. It's that big. I doubt your approach would work in some place as contained as Texas. It might work in a place like Hawaii, if, say, raptor poaching at the local dinosaur exhibit was a problem.
      - M_Grey 10y ago
        Elephants have a wide range, but it's not as though they teleport across that range in the dead of night. They're large, you can track their calls for miles, and they often take predictable routes for their entire lives. You don't need to protect empty land, you just need to have rotating teams covering the elephants.
        astrodust 10y ago
        Rotating teams. Replacement vehicles. Spare parts. Fuel. Food. Batteries. Crew swaps. Visas and permits. Armed guards to protect the anti-poaching crew when they might run into conflict with local militia. It's also not like elephants pick areas to travel that are particularly friendly to vehicles. Look at this track one group took from one side of Africa to the other: https://safarihorizons.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/in-the-tracks-of-giants-following-elephant-migration-routes-across-southern-africa/ https://safarihorizons.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/in-the-track... Africa is not known for having exceptionally well maintained roads, they make Russian backwoods trails look like the Autobahn, and that goes quadruple inside a nature reserve. Driving this distance in any vehicle would be absolute hell.
        10y ago
avar 10y ago
> This is a game you can't win by protecting the animals > alone. You need to kill demand. Why not satisfy the demand? We're not worried about the demand for chickens making them extinct, but if chickens were still delicious but it was illegal to trade them we'd surely be in the same situation with chickens facing certain extinction. Why isn't that an acceptable solution for elephants? Developed western countries sell expensive hunting tags for large animals. Are elephants stuck in some economical limbo where it's too expensive to raise them but too tempting to kill them in the wild? Or is profitable culling simply rejected out of hand for moral reasons that aren't applied to similar animals in the west (e.g. bears).
- astazangasta 10y ago
  As far as I know you can't actually breed elephants in captivity very successfully. This link has some good info: http://right-tourism.com/2014/10/captive-elephants-arent-contributing-conservation/#sthash.XbYiA8H1.dpbs http://right-tourism.com/2014/10/captive-elephants-arent-con...
  - avar 10y ago
    I'm not talking about shooting captive elephants in zoos, but having legalized hunting in massive game reserves big enough for these animals to range in. E.g. this Radiolab episode interviews a guy who paid to hunt a black rhino, it goes into how populations of wild animals have been boosted in certain parts of Africa by massive game reserves that are run for-profit for hunting purposes: http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/
    - astrodust 10y ago
      This might be news to you but it's pretty much an open secret that most of those ranges are barely distinguishable from poaching. They work hard to justify their kills, like they'll claim an animal needs to be put down anyway, or there's an unusually large concentration of them in one spot and it's not practical to relocate them, anything to meet the base legal requirement. They give a thin veneer of legality to an otherwise illegal practice.