4 ms·
I wonder if legalizing the sale of elephants, rhino horns, etc. (but still protecting the ones in the wild) would lead to a sort of positive version of the http
by centimeter 9y ago
I wonder if legalizing the sale of elephants, rhino horns, etc. (but still protecting the ones in the wild) would lead to a sort of positive version of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
After all, if you can make tons of money selling rhino horns (but know you’ll get shot if you kill an existing rhino to do it), people might start putting a lot of money into rhino farms, which could be good for the global population size.
- uhtred 9y agoEven if there were a billion Rhinos, killing them for their horns should never be acceptable.
- centimeter 9y agoWhy? We kill over 50 billion other animals a year for their body parts.
- uhtred 9y agoYes and we shouldn't kill those animals either. We shouldn't be killing any animals, for food or otherwise.
- mfoy_ 9y agoNo. People weren't "farming" them before laws cracked down on it. Laws cracked down on it precisely because of how people were going about getting ivory. Besides, we're not aiming for pure population count... imagine the shitty quality of life an "ivory farm elephant" would have? And after they take the horn or tusk, what then? Meat?
- centimeter 9y agoPeople weren’t farming because there was a plentiful natural supply that was easy to get at. The costs of acquiring “free range” elephant is already so high that if you allowed people the cheaper option of farming elephants, it would probably be viable. You don’t have to kill an elephant (or rhino) to take their tusks. Presumably their quality of life would be no worse than that of e.g. cows.
- animal531 9y agoRhino horn for example regrows at about 9cm per year, which is worth very roughly $2000-$15000 (I'm unsure about recent prices). So they can be farmed and have decent lives. The trick is that if the price is high they're still going to get poached. If the price is low then it'll be too costly to feed them and it won't be worth it in the first place.
- usrusr 9y agoNo way. The food investment would be massive, by the time you'd have nurtured your first elephant to the point of growing big tusks it would be a massive target for violent theft, back to square one.
- emiliobumachar 9y agoAnother idea: legalize fraud in the narrow case of selling fake endangered animal parts. Let a big corporation manufacture fake ivory at scale, and mail it to whomever wants to try to pass it off as the real thing.