Elephants Shot with Poison Arrows Travel to Humans for Help

If a person, derives his world from his senses, and acts as he instinctively would, no science need be involved - he is acting as he is programmed to. I think morality is much the same, it is a society, deriving its collective world from the senses of all its individuals, and acts as it instinctively would. As a society, deriving the world from our tongues, our stomachs, and our hearts, we have decided confining pigs and cows to dirty prisons, kidnapping their children and forcefully impregnating the adult females, and killing the healthy adult animals, is fine, because it will fill our stomachs and delight our noses and tongues. On the other hand, some of us deriving the world from the empathy in our hearts, because some of us see the similarity between the cognition of elephants and our own, conclude elephant poaching is murder. Some others, who live closely with elephants and rely on their farms to not be invaded by elephants, who rely on their crops to fill their stomachs, see killing elephants as a justifiable act comparable to killing cows and pigs.

Morality is relative, and it is a derived from our experiences with the world. Even if our senses are fooling us, morality is right according to our point of view, and that's all that need to ever matter. No science need be involved, and there is no need to couch it in reason.

You like elephants, I like elephants. We both eat beef. Poachers and farmers who live next to elephants rely on crops for food and see elephants as a source of income. They're closer and can attack the elephants before we can stop them. We have money to fund non-profit organisations to hire veterinarians to treat the elephants before they die and to hire rangers to shoot at the poachers and farmers who attack elephants for their own family's benefit. That's just how it is.

Because thes submitted article is about poachers, not ranchers.

When someone submits an article about ranchers you don't get comments saying "but don't forget the elephant poachers".

Because the article is about poachers you moralizer.

It's because biodiversity is beneficial to all species on Earth because it makes for a more resilient and stable ecosystem. Poaching endangered species tends to drive those doecies to extinction, reducing biodiversity which as I've explained is a common good for all living species. Ranching maintains biodiversity by establishing an equilibrium artificial ecosystem. Combined with conservation, it contributes to economic prosperity and sustainable management of a rich and resilient ecology.

People do vilify ranchers. There are tons of organizations that are fighting against animal farming, and it's a movement that is gaining a lot of traction. Like others have said, people just aren't talking about here since this article is about poaching.

On that logic, murderers would be better if they killed everyone, as then murder would not be sustainable.

Loss of species diversity, 50 million years of evolution, and potentially profound impacts on ecosystems.

Look for the story in the past year or so about dramatic impacts of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone.

How Wolves Change Rivers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

http://www.livescience.com/17263-yellowstone-wolf-environmen...

Destroy a species and it's gone forever.

Moreover, if you're looking to eliminate suffering, it's humans and their rampant overconsumption which are driving that. Not the elephant.

I hope people stop downvoting you because this is an excellent question.

There is a number of species in that ecology today, let's call it N. It's a known good number of species: they work together, more or less, to stay alive as a group.

There are smaller collections of species which are nonviable. For example, if all species disappeared except elephants and tigers (2 species) the entire ecosystem would then disappear (the elephants would starve and then the tigers would) and eventually only inorganic material would remain.

There is a number of species, let's call it K, below which the probability of entire ecosystem collapse is nontrivial. We don't know what K is, but if we care about the existence of any ecosystem we must approach it carefully. And we won't know we've crossed it unless we go over.

We know K is somewhere between 2 and N. I think a good strategy is just to put the brakes on all extinction to try to buy us extra time to do science while we are approaching N=K.

As long as we keep N above K, we have a relatively easy problem: influencing a system at equilibrium. Once N drops below K we have a much harder problem: bootstrapping an ecology from nothing. Keeping N above K gives us more agency for less effort.

For that reason, I think the extinction of elephants would be bad.

> Why does it matter if, say, elephants go extinct? If they're extinct they're not suffering.

That's the same logic a cartoon supervillain uses to justify a plan for destroying the world.

To answer your question directly. I believe that elephants probably have inner lives at least as rich as humans with severe developmental problems, and thus should probably be afforded the same level of legal protection.

Neither. Society is changing, at least in the West, eventually all animals will be treated humanely and reared in conditions that are not only better for the animal physically but allow them to interact and socialise as they would do in the wild, and therefore its better for them mentally.

if probability x >> (1 - x) then citing 1-x does not reinforce your case.

More generally, the underlying message here of course is not whether or not this particular story is true, but that there is a large body of evidence that elephants are intelligent animals. It is extremely unlikely that all of these stories are untrue. Thus the underlying thrust of your arguments (elephants are probably stupid) is disingenuous.