Is there an ethical issue with flooding the market with replica ivory? It would at least raise transaction costs and risks for poachers and their supply chains.
It might lead to people being killed for knowingly or unknowingly passing off fake ivory as the real thing.
The ivory trade, like the drug trade, is entrenched. There are a lot of people involved. There’s a large, complex, long-standing, and covert structure to deal with. As law enforcement has so clearly demonstrated, you can’t solve behavioral problems at scale with contempt and violence.
The really thorny problems in the world won’t be beaten into submission. To negotiate our way out of this problem, it’s necessary to see the offenders as real, valuable human beings.
What they're doing is harmful and needs to be stopped; sometimes violence may sadly be necessary to protect elephant and human lives. That doesn't mean that the life of a mere courier is worthless and can be thoughtlessly discarded.
The lesson of the drug war is twofold: it is immoral to dictate what a person does with their body to the extent they are not harming society, and it is impractical to try to limit the harm drug use does to society by criminalizing drug use and sale. However that is not equivalent to saying, for example, that we ought to try to reason with and come to an understanding with vicious drug cartels. I was proud that I could vote to legalize marijuana in Washington State, and I hope it's a small step on the road to a total dismantling of the War On Drugs. But the point of all that is to weaken the cartels so that they may be destroyed. I would happily bury every member of Los Zetas at the center of the Earth.
So it goes with poaching syndicates.
People matter. Life matters. Killing those you judge to "not matter" is the beginning of the spiral slide to inhumanity.
Catch, incarcerate, re-educate.
Don't ever kill as a punishment. The death penalty is barbaric, and is only condoned by barbarians.
The people at the bottom end of the ivory trade are probably very similar to the people at the bottom end of the drugs trade, or the piracy (real, not digital) trade. Uneducated, and desperate.
Killing is a simple solution, espoused by simple minds, for very complex problems.
With the exception of high profile politically motivated assassinations, where the victim becomes a rallying point for civil unrest, murdering your enemies tends to result in having fewer enemies. The world as a whole simply does not care enough about individual humans to invest its resources into rehabilitating criminals rather than punishing them. And when the humane solution would involve a complete overhaul of an entire economy, including improvements to the public education system, you're talking some real money.
Training up a few wildlife rangers and keeping them well stocked with bullets is a minimum viable solution for keeping the elephant herds alive long enough for the local economy to develop enough to make poaching for ivory obsolete. Re-education requires infrastructure that we take for granted in industrialized countries, but is simply not yet present in rural Africa, away from the cities.
Not even the U.S. can pull this off in its own backyard. Re-educate all you want, but if the guy still can't find a job good enough to pay his family after you finish, he'll go right back to growing weed, cooking meth, distilling moonshine, running guns, poaching ivory, or whatever other illegal thing that pays a month of wages or more in one score. And never mind re-education, if educating the first time isn't good enough for a decent job. How many people with a BA in History work in a restaurant or cafe or retail store for their living? Is an ex-con with a GED going to do any better?
Execution may be barbaric, but it produces immediate, visible results, which may be touted by politicians as "doing something about the problem." There's no way they would spring for a solution that would take at least a full generation to take hold, stress the treasury to the breaking point, and end up putting more power in the hands of the common people, rather than keeping it vested in the elites.
You can't rehabilitate just the criminal. You also have to rehabilitate all the circumstances that led to the crime. Otherwise, just as with killing, someone else steps in to fill the niche vacated by the ex-criminal.
Rehabilitation is an expensive solution, espoused by compassionate but impractical minds, for very complex problems.
>The world as a whole simply does not care enough about individual humans to invest its resources into rehabilitating criminals rather than punishing them.
The argument over capital punishment is a debate in the US, but not in many other countries.[1]
As of July 2015, of the 195 independent states that are UN members or have UN observer status:
-102 have abolished it for all crimes;
-7 have abolished, but retain it for exceptional or special circumstances (such as crimes committed in wartime);
-50 retain, but have not used it for at least 10 years or are under a moratorium;
-36 retain it in both law and practice.
The map on that Wikipedia entry should show you what esteemed company the US is in with regards to maintaining the death penalty.
>Not even the U.S. can pull this off in its own backyard.
Meghan J. Ryan, in her paper "Death and Rehabilitation"[2] discusses how, in the US, the threat of the death penalty is somehow considered to be a trigger for rehabilitation. A dangerous conflation if ever I saw one, and an article worth reading. I won't quote from it, as it discusses both sides of the argument, and I don't want to cherry pick. You should read it, while remembering that it discusses the topic from a uniquely American viewpoint.
>Training up a few wildlife rangers and keeping them well stocked with bullets is a minimum viable solution for keeping the elephant herds alive long enough for the local economy to develop enough to make poaching for ivory obsolete. Re-education requires infrastructure that we take for granted in industrialized countries, but is simply not yet present in rural Africa, away from the cities.
Regarding poaching, rehab has been proven to work[3]:
During training courses, even convicted poachers have been rehabilitated and sent out to work as rangers
These rangers were part of the problem, and are now part of the solution. If they had been killed, they wouldn't be part of anything. This also seems to show that the problem of training infrastructure in rural Africa is being solved, and that further efforts in this direction would have greater benefit.
Other than that, your argument seems to be that the problem is too large and too expensive. I argue that history has shown that we can, and should change our nature, and that killing isn't as cheap as you suggest.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_capital_punishment_by_c...
[2]:http://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/46/4/Articles/46-4_R...
[3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo...
Assuming the fake ivory is cheap enough to manufacture, this could be a sustainable industry, as well as save wildlife.
That only works if the fake product and the real product are indistinguishable goods. Fake ivory and real ivory are not equivalent; one has value as a status symbol. The cheaper fake ivory becomes, the more of a premium there is on having the real thing.
That's the fear, anyway, and it's not total fantasy. Luxury car brands capture new customers with that exact model. The lowest tier of luxury car is even called the "entry-level" segment.
Experts aren't sure if it would be a problem yet, and are understandably concerned they might simply make the problem worse. Don't rule the concept out simply for vague association with the failing "war on drugs". "Should we flood the market with imitation ivory" and "Should we ban cannabis" are very different questions.
Also, indirect prohibition has shown to be failure time and time again, often being more harmful than not.