New elephant study shows catastrophic decline in Africa | Hacker News Reader

New elephant study shows catastrophic decline in Africa

cnn.com

72 pointsadamnemecek67 comments

You guys should consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights these poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[2], is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train the park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed.

There is also the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[3][4] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans (most of them are orphans due to poaching). For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular orphan and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor this little fella [5][6]. It's a great gift.

You can also participate in an upcoming hackathon this October 7-9 in London, San Diego, Seattle, Sydney and DC that will aim to fight poaching. [7]

[0] http://www.iapf.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander

[3] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust

[5] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp...

[6] http://instagram.com/p/sigT3IAUKb

[7] http://www.zoohackathon.com/

P.S. You should subscribe to http://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs and http://reddit.com/r/babyrhinogifs for a daily dose of adorable pachyderm content.

Alternatively, attack the buyer mentality? Promote awareness of the issue to problem countries.

A lot of organizations are trying to do that. Yao Ming is also trying to work on this https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/ex-rocket-yao-ming-aims...

His previous shark fin campaign was successful the demand dropped by like 80% IIRC.

Changing thousands of years of culture saying ivory is a sign of wealth and that you should show it off may prove very difficult, unfortunately. Many people simply don't care.

This is great, thanks for sharing. I donated. I hope they see a real HN effect in more than just traffic.

Thanks a bunch! I give them out as presents too, with great success.

>elephants are actually far more valuable alive than dead...Every elephant killed will earn a poacher just a few hundred dollars...a live elephant can earn more than a million dollars for communities involved in eco-tourism...

Poachers are driven by money, why not hire them as eco-tourism guides. For them they get a stable income and no threat of death by soldier. I guess when you hire one poacher, another 10 are waiting to begin poaching...?

People who are willing to brutally kill an animal for a few hundred dollars, may not make the best eco-tourism guides. They obviously don't actually care about the environment and animals to begin with.

Sorry for the bad source, I just did a quick search but Naples hired ex-cons, well versed in the trade of scamming tourists to help tourists avoid getting scammed.

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/33773898#33773898

My thinking is they hire a bunch of poachers, basically become informants to learn the poaching trade. Lure them out with money, more than they could earn as a poacher and try to get ahead of these guys.

Thats the best strategy. An elder told me of his distant relative, who was producing counterfeit coins like 100 years ago. When he got caught, instead of sentencing him to prison, they hired him in the coin minting place.

I think that is the wrong way to look at things. I think many poachers are just poor people who are trying to survive. It is a bit hard to care about the environment if your own meals aren't taken care of. If being an ecotourism guide pays better than being a poacher then it will be a good incentive to do a good job.

That's nonesense. You can brutally kill cats and (smallish) dogs, but anything bigger will fight back pretty badly. Brutalizing any animal that is twice your body size is a good recipe for getting yourself maimed or killed, even in a controled environment. Ask any slaugherhouse worker if you don't believe.

Which takes us back to the economic motive. Once you realize that this people are, for the most part, not saddistic mosters but regular guys who break arbitrary rules for personal gain, you will realize that they do not care about what you care because there's nothing for them to gain there. For the most part, they care about the things the people paying the bills tell them to care about.

So, why are you so afraid of the idea of being the guy who pays the bill and decides what stuff to care about? Is it that you dont want to know what price would you put to an elephant life, or it's just that you love to hate poachers?

I wonder if legalization would enable ivory farms, and if raising elephants could ever be paid for with ivory sales, considering they're such massive animals. Remember, an elephant pregnancy alone takes like 18 months! And the amount of food elephants need. Truly magnificent mammals.

Someone was trying to flood the market with near-indistinguishable fake ivory.

If Africa cannot establish a safe habitat for these creatures, we need to establish a breeding reserve for them in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_rewilding

One issue with that is that elephants tend to roam over thousands of miles and this could be tricky in the US if an elephant herd came to town. Fun fact, they actually have a 'built-in gps', one elephant can tell another elephant about a location thousands of miles away and the other elephant is able to locate it, https://www.thedodo.com/elephants-travel-humans-help-1353631...

Also it's not just about saving the species but also about the fact that elephants are super important for the ecosystem. Like some of the ecosystems could collapse without elephants.

TIL I have a built-in GPS. Neat.

I personally agree with this, but even here on the West Coast (Washington State) we have had recent kill offs of endangered wolf packs, all because they killed a few cattle.

Yes, there would likely be better protection, however the ramifications of such a thing makes it unlikely to pass. Where would they go and who would pay for the ensuing destruction of property, as would happen.

I am very much willing to pay for it through taxes, but this is probably not very politically palatable, which is a statement about the sad state of our politics.

Note I'm also a fan of the Buffalo Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Commons

Who buys ivory? Are the customers mainly in Asia, and for aphrodisiac purposes, or is this a stereotyp?

Yes, it's mainly in Asia but it's not uncommon in the US either (one of the biggest opponents of total ban is, surprise surprise, the NRA). China is number one, US is number two.

It's not bought as an aphrodisiac (you are thinking of rhino horn), ivory is mostly to make decorative trinkets.

just as a heads up, the aphrodisiac thing is a long-running myth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros#Horn_trade_and_use

Anything people believe strongly is an aphrodisiac is one via the placebo effect.

Except they don't believe that. It is said to cure illnesses and is in some cases a status symbol. Belief that it is used as an aphrodisiac was supposedly fabricated.

1. China makes so much fake stuff any way why not fake ivory.

2. How is the market for trinkets that big.

> 1. China makes so much fake stuff any way why not fake ivory.

People have been suggesting this for some time but it would probably only drive the interest in genuine ivory

> 2. How is the market for trinkets that big.

Ivory in China has been historically a symbol of wealth. The growing middle and upper classes in China want to show off their wealth, what better way than by buying something like this

https://geography3822.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/ivory-on-s...

China makes a bunch of fake designer clothes, many openly sold in US markets and stores. That doesn't stop nouveau riche Chinese from being the top consumers of "real" designer clothing/fashion.

NRA position on ivory ban: https://www.nraila.org/articles/20140305/ivory-ban-fact-shee...

I think your reference to the NRA is a bit misleading in this case. The NRA had similar concerns as people who repair and sell used pianos. That is there is a large existing inventory of guns and pianos that use ivory. A total ban would make criminal many otherwise innocent transactions.

See:

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20140305/ivory-ban-fact-shee... http://www.ptg.org/scripts/4disapi.dll/4DCGI/cms/review.html...

The NRA was pushing against it with much more force though.

As interesting trivia, the reason why elephants went extinct in northern Africa is largely because of the massive number that were brought to Rome and killed in gladiatorial games.

Why not legalize the trade and sale of ivory and have states become the sole monopoly of their sale? where so you think the money is coming from?

Once it's legal you can start to squeeze the black market through legislation and regulation. If it's illegal then you're completely powerless.

There's so many parallels here of drug legalization.

This will not work. What will happen is that

a.) the legal market will serve as a cover for the illegal market

b.) you have no way of determining origin of ivory

c.) where would this 'legal' ivory come from in the first place?

d.) enforcement of these rules is impossible or difficult at best. Currently, there are are 6 Fish and Wildlife service employees that are supposed to monitor all incoming cargo to NY and NJ ports for illegal wildlife products. That's very few people for the job.

> There's so many parallels here of drug legalization.

Upon closer inspection there actually aren't. The process of manufacturing drugs isn't actually all that bad (if you ignore the distribution and consumption).

This shifts the issue from elephants being killed indiscriminately for their tusks to an issue of state collected taxes and fees. In the long term it's much better to have the latter.

You determine the origin by creating a system that leaves paper trails everywhere, from those that collect to those that sell, to exporters. The beauty of a legal system is that everything is recorded and on the books.

Enforcement is easy when your project is self-funded through the internal and legal trade of ivory.

You didn't answer the question where the legal ivory comes from.

Did you know that a Rhino's horn and an elephant's tusk can be safely removed by trained zoologist without harming the animal? In fact they do it to elephants in captivity that destroy fences[0].

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24614538

AFAIK, they can't remove the whole tusk. For one thing and for another, even if we ignore the morality of this, how do you ensure who removed the tusk?

Elephants will continue to be poached, as long as the demand for ivory exceeds the supply generated by the licensed channels. Those channels will also need to harvest tusks from elephants. (Maybe not by killing them, but leaving them without tusks, which is still cruel and ecologically damaging.)

I'm not sure I see the "many parallels". I don't think ivory should ever be legal, whether it's squeezed through legislation and regulation or not.

Why not send our (the West's) soldiers and drones into Africa instead of the Middle East?

This is the same thinking of those that thing recreational drug use should be illegal. The reality is there will be a huge market for it potentially forever, and burning cash and power to fight it is an exercise in futility.

Instead ask yourself what's something we can do right now that will completely take the oxygen out of the illegal ivory trade.

Don't you see the legality is part of the mystique around ivory? When it becomes an every day product then morons will stop believing it has secret medicinal powers and move on.

> The reality is there will be a huge market for it potentially forever, and burning cash and power to fight it is an exercise in futility.

No there won't. The situation wasn't that bad until 2008 when CITES lifted restrictions on selling ivory which let some African countries sell their ivory to Japan and China. The situation has gotten a lot worse since then.

> Instead ask yourself what's something we can do right now that will completely take the oxygen out of the illegal ivory trade.

Where do you get 'legal' ivory?

That sounds like a lot of ivory. There are 7 billion people on the planet. 1.4 billion in China where ivory is highly coveted. There are not even a million elephants?

The difference here is what is destroyed by a given regulation.

Drugs by themselves are typically locally destructive to the user. In the case of legality, they have recourse to eliminate the destruction (rehab and other community sources) vs. the continuing destruction that is available in the modern prison system. The lack of positive recourse is destructive socially too, due to black market competition (which is far more murderous than legal competition).

Drugs made legal might cause some destruction of rain forest, but might create instead better conservation. All in all, the regulations around drugs currently are nothing but negative.

There is nothing positive about the ivory trade. Legal and illegal ivory trade is largely harmless at the consumer end, but at the production end we are losing an entire species, and that will have ecological costs that we can't even begin to summarize. Even if we cut off the tusks and sold those, poachers would continue to kill of those elephants as well (happened with rhinos, so this is demonstrated in a real world example).

These are entirely different real world scenarios and should be treated as such.

I understand and can appreciate the support people have on HN for legalizing all drugs, but you trying to compare it to the Ivory trade is absolutely ludicrous.

Just take a minute to compare the source differences between a popular drug like marijuana and Ivory. Any thing you can think of that might be morally wrong or hard to scale when it comes to the source of Ivory?

You're confused because ivory is not a mind altering drug. What I'm comparing it to is the global illicit black market that exists because both ivory and drugs are illegal yet are in huge demand.

No you are confused, they are restricted for different reasons.

I don't think you understand where ivory comes from at all. Drugs come from plants and processing, ivory comes from slaughtering/mutilating endangered species

The brutality is there because it's completely illegal and underground. Are you telling me that modern science is unable to safely remove an elephant's tusk without destroying the animal? There's a huge difference between idiots in the bush hacking away with a chainsaw and trained zoologist in a lab.

> Are you telling me that modern science is unable to safely remove an elephant's tusk without destroying the animal?

Not entire tusks no. What will happen with these tusked elephants btw? Would you object if I pulled out your teeth? You would be under sedatives of course. I really want this necklace made out of your teeth.

Are you really asking me if I'd rather have my teeth pulled out by a dentist or half my face and mouth cut off with a chainsaw? Which of these two would you choose?

False dilemma. If you ban ivory sales the odds of you having it cut off with a chainsaw are much lower.

As long as this monopolized sale volume is zero, so that elephants aren't being killed, I'm all for it. Except that it won't make a difference in that case (see below).

Your analogy is flawed because: legalization of, say, marijuana doesn't stop marijuana plants from being killed in large numbers.

The goal behind marijuana being illicit isn't to protect the marijuana plant from extinction. (The goal is rather the application of an ideology that is fully understood only by certain people who want to control other people's lives.)

Drug legalization only works when it makes drugs widely available and inexpensive. That's what removes the incentive of the hardened criminals to engage in trafficking, along with all the collateral crime and violence --- not the fact that anything has become legal.

If some commodity is legal but controlled, and licenses are not actually handed out in any significant numbers so that it is still scarce, then the trafficking will continue exactly as before, in the same manner.

I'm talking about harvesting and selling every single elephant tusk. That's 100%. There aren't that many Elephants born in Africa, and apparently we're able to track every single one of them.

I'm advocating safely removing the tusk via trained zoologist with modern science so that it leaves the elephant without its tusk.

> I'm talking about harvesting and selling every single elephant tusk. That's 100%.

100% of what?

> There aren't that many Elephants born in Africa, and apparently we're able to track every single one of them.

We definitely aren't actually. These are estimates.

> 'm advocating safely removing the tusk via trained zoologist with modern science so that it leaves the elephant without its tusk.

Yeah, that will not happen. Dude stop commenting you are just embarrassing yourself.

Clearly we have a fundemental disagreement about how to stop elephants from being brutally killed in Africa. In the long term I believe safely harvesting the tusk by governments and selling them in a tightly regulated and legal marketplace will greatly reduce the ability for poachers to both harvest and sell ivory illegally, which in turn will drastically cut the occurrences of elephants and rhino's from being brutally killed throughout Africa. I'm not "embarrassed" by this position at all and I'm not sure why you suggest this.

I have no issue with you advocating we keep the trade illegal. After all that's how it is right now and I don't see anything changing in the future.

10 people in this thread told you that your suggestion will not work yet you choose to ignore that. I think that you aren't quite interested in the solution.

Do you feel embarrassed if you express an unpopular opinion?

If that's what you want to call it. I interpret is as an opinion that's based on nothing and you plug your ears when confronted with facts.

How do you know that elephants can function as a species without their tusks?

Also, tourists want to see elephants with their tusks.

Maybe a swap could be done. The elephants get titanium prosthetic tusks in exchange for their ivory ones.

Virtually everyone on the planet uses drugs of some kind, and they generally see nothing wrong with it. The vast majority of humans go through their entire lives without caring about ivory, and those who do care usually come down on the side of not killing elephants. The lesson to draw from the drug war isn't "bans don't work," but rather "bans don't work when you ban something nearly ubiquitous that people don't see anything wrong with."

meantime, people are hunting mammoth tusk

recent report (Russian):

http://www.currenttime.tv/a/tusk-hunters/27948066.html

quote: ``Оборот слоновой кости тщательно контролируется, поэтому особым спросом сейчас пользуются бивни мамонта '' The ivory market is tightly controlled therefore mammoth tusk is in high demand right now

quote: ``Этот 65-килограммовый бивень только что извлекли из вечной мерзлоты. Впоследствии его продали за 34 тысячи долларов.'' - This 65 kg tusk was sold later for 34 thousands dollars.

old report (2013 English): http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/125-mammoth-tusks/...

let's not mince words. The catastrophic acceleration in decline of elephant populations is directly correlated to the rise in wealth of China and Asia in general. For countries with such advanced IQ and engineering skills, this is a massive stain on their reputation. They need to address this massively.

Now I'm fully aware that most of the decline in the Elephant (and other) species in general in the past 200 years can be blamed squarely on the West. But this does not excuse snuffing out these absolutely priceless brethren of humanity for the most base of barbaric reasons, now that there are so few of them left.

Asia needs to sort this out, like, yesterday. The West has huge historic baggage on this and thankfully was able to turn itself around at the last minute. Now china and Asia seriously need to do the same, pronto. PRONTO.

We should introduce them in Texas and Mexico as invasive species. I know it sounds silly but they'd probably really thrive.

At one time, during the late Pleistocene epoch, woolly mammoths roamed North America. They were close cousins of the Asian elephant, and so you could argue that elephants would not be invasive, any more than horses (current North American horses are from Eurasia, original North American horse species is extinct...).

An angry elephant is a lot more dangerous than an angry horse.

or Columbia the hippos like it there

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