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> I mean what would be the point of this? Prevent wild elephants from going extinct. > Are we trying to prevent suffering of an intelligent species or what?

> I mean what would be the point of this? Prevent wild elephants from going extinct. > Are we trying to prevent suffering of an intelligent species or what? No. If that were humanity's goal, we would have stopped eating pork.

adamnemecek 9y ago
> Prevent wild elephants from going extinct. humans aren't raising pigs to prevent their extinction tho. > No. If that were humanity's goal, we would have stopped eating pork. The tides are slowly turning but we shouldn't be enslaving yet another species.
- tetromino_ 9y ago
  The situation with pork vs. wild boar is very different from the elephant, and more analogous to beef vs. the Cape Buffalo. We don't need to hunt wild boar for meat thanks to factory farming of pork. Tracking a boar in the woods just for its meat makes no economic sense. We hunt the boar mainly for the experience of killing a dangerous and intelligent animal. But selling experience is hard to scale, esp. because only a very small subset of humanity has been allowed to engage in that sort of hunt (formerly by legally enforced social class distinctions and land ownership, more recently by cultural norms). As a result, the hunting of boar is kept to a sustainable level. As for the elephant, we don't need the meat either. And if hunting were only for the trophy hunter's experience, it would be sustainable. But the problem is the ivory: plastic is not a good enough substitute, so prices for the real thing are astronomical, and industrial-scale poaching of wild elephants makes economic sense for the unscrupulous. If we farm-raise enough elephants to drop the price of ivory to the point that poachers could gain more from other illegal pursuits - illegal mining, stealing non-ferrous metals from construction sites, tapping into oil pipelines etc. - we would save the wild elephant.
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    These are all very theoretical claims.

adamnemecek 9y ago

> Prevent wild elephants from going extinct. humans aren't raising pigs to prevent their extinction tho. > No. If that were humanity's goal, we would have stopped eating pork. The tides are slowly turning but we shouldn't be enslaving yet another species.

tetromino_ 9y ago
The situation with pork vs. wild boar is very different from the elephant, and more analogous to beef vs. the Cape Buffalo. We don't need to hunt wild boar for meat thanks to factory farming of pork. Tracking a boar in the woods just for its meat makes no economic sense. We hunt the boar mainly for the experience of killing a dangerous and intelligent animal. But selling experience is hard to scale, esp. because only a very small subset of humanity has been allowed to engage in that sort of hunt (formerly by legally enforced social class distinctions and land ownership, more recently by cultural norms). As a result, the hunting of boar is kept to a sustainable level. As for the elephant, we don't need the meat either. And if hunting were only for the trophy hunter's experience, it would be sustainable. But the problem is the ivory: plastic is not a good enough substitute, so prices for the real thing are astronomical, and industrial-scale poaching of wild elephants makes economic sense for the unscrupulous. If we farm-raise enough elephants to drop the price of ivory to the point that poachers could gain more from other illegal pursuits - illegal mining, stealing non-ferrous metals from construction sites, tapping into oil pipelines etc. - we would save the wild elephant.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  These are all very theoretical claims.