Why are poachers shitty but ranchers are not? It seems much more ethical to me to kill an existing wild animal for money vs. breeding new animals in inhumane conditions for the sole purpose of killing them for money later on.
Why? Why is it bad? Why does it matter if, say, elephants go extinct? If they're extinct they're not suffering.
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.
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.
The issue with humans is that we are rapidly increasing the rate of extinction, by pollution, poaching, exclusively occupying large tracts of land, clear-cutting forests, etc.
It doesn't have to be " a lot" to keep an ecosystem in balance. A species that is there, even in low numbers(near extinction) could be the thread that ecosystem balance is hanging on by.
The issue with extinction is while it's natural for a few species to go extinct, due to human influence we are losing between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. (Source: http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversi...)
We are part of the ecosystem we are damaging. You may take it for granted that animals continue to pollinate the plants you eat at dinner time. You make take it for granted that vultures cleaning up the dead prevent the spread of disease. There are many other cases of how the ecosystem is all tied together in a way that is integral to the human race's survival.
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.
So yes, the same logic applies to humans; I would prefer the human race including myself to be wiped out if the alternative was Matrix-style enslavement.
Elephants are not in the same position as cattle. When lab-grown meat is a viable alternative there may well be a decision to abandon ranching (and by extension cows as a species) en masse. But we don't depend on eating elephants for food; people kill elephants for status reasons (ivory, 'medicines').
Once an elephant is shot, the villagers just start to appear. Word gets out fast.
It is like a celebration when an elephant is killed, the entire village will join in.
The natives cut all of the meat off the bone and take it to their village to eat.
They don’t let anything go to waste.
You're right, there is a distinction. We don't imprison elephants and raise them for the sole purpose of imprisonment, impregnation and death.
It talks about how hunting is used as a funding mechanism for conservation, and in general the ethics of whether (and how) killing an individual could benefit the species as a whole.
If you have 50 or so minutes to spare, I highly recommend it.
Isn't killing someone preferable to enslaving and torturing them and forcing them to reproduce so that you may do the same to their descendants?
When someone submits an article about ranchers you don't get comments saying "but don't forget the elephant poachers".
I couldn't care less about elephants or cattle. I just can't stand cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.