Poaching behind worst African elephant losses in 25 years
sciencebulletin.org
sciencebulletin.org
[1] http://mavulture.com/political-corruption/mother-of-the-nati...
But I do also second your question: Why is this on HN? It is pretty common knowledge that overhunting + poaching and poor game management are the primary reason for the loss of megafauna on the African contient.
edit: People thought my first statement was snark - it isn't. I genuinely had no idea that poaching / corruption was that high up the chain.
I don't find that something which is common knowledge - that poaching + habitat loss is the single driving force behind the loss of African (and other) megafauna - to be news.
We (zoologists) have known this for a long, long time.
However, enough readers of HN did find it interesting for it to make it to the front page. Maybe widespread understanding of the issues amongst non-experts isn't considered important for zoologists. I have no idea. But it's clearly interesting to some people.
In any case, you never know what discussion sparks insight. Poaching is driven by demand. Perhaps a campaign like the superman vs KKK could be employed.
I will keep that in mind on all my comments going forward.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianoce...
[3] https://www.kenyans.co.ke/news/video-jirongo-narrates-how-ru...
"The KWS, charged with protecting Kenya’s game, is accused of consistently underestimating the threat, and Paul Kipkoech, its head of security in Tsavo, claimed in an interview that only 20 elephants had been killed in the park this year. But conservationists say the figure in Tsavo is much higher, perhaps as much as three or four times that. The Tsavo Trust, which runs aerial surveillance of the park, said in its November report that it had discovered six elephants shot dead by poachers that month alone."
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/elephant-appeal-...
Maybe you can tell me what exactly you suspect would go wrong in this limited scenario?
You wouldn't really even have to "go out in the bush" to kill them. You could kill someone and claim they were out there poaching.
I also think you're underestimating just how far out in the middle of nowhere we're talking about here, and how rough the area is. If you want to kill someone and get away with it, there are much much easier ways to make that happen in rural Africa.
I have no clue what you are talking about. You initially responded to me [0]. You are very confused.
Anyway, I still think proximity to civilization should not be the main justification for extrajudicial executions. Thats just like my opinion man.
"I also think you're underestimating just how far out in the middle of nowhere we're talking about here, and how rough the area is. If you want to kill someone and get away with it, there are much much easier ways to make that happen in rural Africa."
I didn't mean kill someone and get away with it. I mean, if person x wants to kill person y to get payout z. That is why I responded to the initial commenter. Without a trial you can claim anyone was anywhere doing anything. You don't have to go to the bush. You can drive 2 miles out of town and kill them. But I obviously don't even know what your position is and honestly don't care so I may be "grasping at straws".
You need to kill demand for this stuff, or you need to sabotage the market so the supply is through the roof like the team making fake rhino horn is doing: http://www.iflscience.com/technology/fake-rhino-horn-fight-p...
Shooting drug dealers, for example, doesn't make people not want to be drug dealers, it just kills off competition and makes the surviving dealers earn way, way more money.
I'm happy to attack this from both ends though.
You can have all the guards in the world attached to these elephants but guards are human and they'll get lazy doing nothing. When they let themselves slip, someone will be there to take advantage of their lapse.
This is a game you can't win by protecting the animals alone. You need to kill demand, you need to make the risk way, way too high for the potential payoff.
One thing you could do to incentivize protecting elephants is offer a payout for a given herd. If someone poaching an elephant costs you money you'd be motivated to protect them, so long as the protection money is greater than any reward for poaching.
Hopefully over time we'll have more technology based solutions like drones that can spot poachers long before they're a threat or civilians who will snitch out poachers because their livelihood is at stake.
People will Kickstarter some pretty crazy things, so maybe theres's a business to be had here. If the local authorities permit selling of naming rights, who knows how high the bidding could get.
Africa is huge and the area that elephant herds wander over is perhaps as large as continental USA. It's that big.
I doubt your approach would work in some place as contained as Texas. It might work in a place like Hawaii, if, say, raptor poaching at the local dinosaur exhibit was a problem.
It's also not like elephants pick areas to travel that are particularly friendly to vehicles. Look at this track one group took from one side of Africa to the other: https://safarihorizons.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/in-the-track...
Africa is not known for having exceptionally well maintained roads, they make Russian backwoods trails look like the Autobahn, and that goes quadruple inside a nature reserve. Driving this distance in any vehicle would be absolute hell.
I agree, the war on drugs is hopeless, but like trying to dump all the alcohol during prohibition you can't win this by guarding things, you can only win it by changing the economics of the entire situation.
Cut demand, boost supply. If you can do that the problem goes way. Nobody poaches ragweed or dandelions.
> This is a game you can't win by protecting the animals
> alone. You need to kill demand.
Why isn't that an acceptable solution for elephants? Developed western countries sell expensive hunting tags for large animals.
Are elephants stuck in some economical limbo where it's too expensive to raise them but too tempting to kill them in the wild? Or is profitable culling simply rejected out of hand for moral reasons that aren't applied to similar animals in the west (e.g. bears).
E.g. this Radiolab episode interviews a guy who paid to hunt a black rhino, it goes into how populations of wild animals have been boosted in certain parts of Africa by massive game reserves that are run for-profit for hunting purposes: http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/
They give a thin veneer of legality to an otherwise illegal practice.
Still, wouldn't it be in their best interest to maintain a sustainable population of their animals least they kill the golden goose?
Because if that's the case their aims perfectly align with conservationists.
These "hunts" are usually injured or malnourished animals unleashed in fairly small pens and shot for trophies. It's absolutely ridiculous and there's no sport in it at all.
They have absolutely no interest in conservation and they'll let people shoot whatever animals they can get their hands on. If they run out of elephants they'll just move on to something else.
> They have absolutely no interest in conservation.
Do you only think that about Africa (why?) or e.g. also for U.S. National Parks or other areas where you can buy hunting tags?
Full disclosure: I don't hunt, I have no interested in doing so. I'm just perplexed that solutions that seem to work in the west to align economic incentives with conservation aren't being applied in Africa.
And furthermore, when you ask about it you don't get any sort of specific answers, but just out of hand dismissive answers seemingly based on motivated reasoning without any explanation of why certain systems would work for animals A in country X, but not animals B in country Y.
In the US hunting is far more closely regulated and the sorts of animals you can gun down are still limited. Endangered species are off the menu.
Also consider that Ducks Unlimited wants there to be more duck hunters, and for that to be possible they need more ducks, which means they need more wetlands. It's in their best interest to keep the wetlands large, healthy, and full of ducks. They don't make money off of hunting rare, nearly extinct ducks. In fact, that probably hurts them in the long run since it ruins it for future generations of hunters.
"Solutions that work in the West" may not work in Africa because while the US is a coherent political entity with federal policies regarding poaching, Africa is a multitude of countries each with their own local geopolitical and economic situations. There is no one authority that can protect elephants since their territory is so vast.
No other animal on earth wanders as far, as frequently, and is the target of such aggressive poaching.
That title of most persecuted used to be held by whales. They're only just starting to recover from the damage that was done over the last few centuries.
Poaching a whale is not an easy thing to do since you need very expensive, specialized equipment and a huge crew. Poaching elephants is something anyone with a truck and a big enough gun can do. It's a totally different situation.
People have tried for centuries to domesticate elephants and have failed. The best we can do now is train them.
Killing elephants for a small amount of ivory is extremely wasteful. If you could bio-engineer some kind of ivory-growing organism, or make some already domesticated animal grow ivory horns (e.g. cows, goats) then you might be able to boost supply to a degree that's meaningful.
The grizzly, black bear, moose, buffalo, deer, countless bird species etc. can't be domesticated, but they can be hunted without endangering their species as a whole.
This is not the same with rare species like elephants, especially those that take decades to fully mature and have extremely complex social structures that are violently disrupted by poaching.
Bears and moose are largely independent. Buffalo and deer work in herds, but are constantly victims of predation to keep their numbers in check.
Elephants and rhinos do not have a lot of predators other than humans, and the biggest threat to their existence may very well be poachers.
Then again, you get yet another side that thinks it's perfectly OK to destroy the existing supply of confiscated goods. I.e. Burning large amounts of ivory, just because. Have a look here:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/30/africa/kenya-ivory-burn/
They burned 105 tons of ivory in one day.
I think what needs to be done is a massive and widespread campaign in Vietnam of education about rhino superstition and shaming of those who contribute to the extinction of the rhino.
There's also a lot of effort from the diamond mining conglomerates to fight against synthetic diamonds. The poachers have no such capability, they're just doing it for money and will move on to whatever else pays better the moment poaching isn't profitable.
It's a two part thing: Increase supply, cut demand. You can't expect miracles without working both angles aggressively, and we've only just started with truly "fake" horns that test as the real thing.
I am Kenyan. A conveniently left out truth when discussing the poaching menace here is that the big bad poacher in the story is non other than the president's mother. Your intelligence in this case will be no match for the force of sheer impunity backed by state resources
You surprise me, from the comments you made a few days back on the European refugee crisis, I though you were a peaceful person. Now your true nature is revealed. Would you be willing to sacrifice your own life, to save the elephants? Would you be willing to kill another human being yourself, to save the elephants? If your not willing, I don't even know how you come up with this ideas!
In this case, the helpless and nearly extinct intelligent animals aren't humans, but elephants. For decades, peaceful attempts have been made to preserve them in some way, and all of those attempts are failing. The alternatives are very clearly to take drastic action, or accept the extinction of an intelligent species.
As for whether I'd be willing to kill a human to save an elephant, yes, I would frankly welcome the chance. I despise people who destroy life in the name of ideology, profit, and a general lack of giving a shit. The only difference for me personally is that I'd be much more willing to kill the people truly responsible, rather than the poachers themselves who are often tools of those people.
In the end, we are all responsible for our own part in the play. Go ahead and shoot poachers - they know what they're doing. Got to break the chain somewhere.
Best is to import these animals to USA and breed them.
The cost to tourism is likely staggering compared to the profit a poacher makes. Perhaps state and environmental campaigns can fund protection of the animals. One part prestige and one part economic? For-hire endangered species body guards?
I'd say the best thing would be to maintain elephant populations domestically on wildlife reserves. Saving the species is important, but it doesn't give us the right to interfere with foreign affairs.
It would be lot more cost efficient than invading kenya or creating political instability.
The reason why elephants are being killed is because they're worth more dead than alive to the poacher and likely the local community or otherwise the local community would do more to protect the animals from poachers. What if there was a fund that paid local communities for each live elephant? The community now has an incentive to prevent poaching.
I suppose some of the foreseeable side effects could be the community preventing elephant migration in order to increase the local numbers, but these types of details could be worked out.
Sure. Problem is the economic problem is...well Africa sized. You're not going to fix that any time soon. Plus Asia sized as well...a fair amount of the drive is coming from there esp on the rhino poaching side.
Could the elephant's tusks be removed and replaced with false tusks? I'm assuming there would be some way to replace them the way an implant is used to replace a tooth in a human.
If the prosthetic tusk were obvious (a bright color for example) it would signal to the would-be poacher, "No ivory here."
The tusks removed would be destroyed.
I think this was discovered when they poisoned rhino horns (ground rhino horn is a traditional oral medicine) and marked them with bright color to identify them as poisoned. Poachers killed the marked rhinos and left the horns.
The loss of the rhino and the elephant would be tragic, but those people who consume it do not deserve to die - they don't understand what they're doing or what they're causing, and they are worth more than rhinos.
Edit, since I can't respond to your comment: There is already an information battle to convince people that traffic in and using rhino horn is not possibly good for them. If they will not believe scientists telling them that, they won't believe it's poisoned. Nothing short of a mass market and culture shift is likely to change their beliefs. Telling them it's poisoned would certainly have too many misses and too little reach to be acceptable.
You would tell them. How do people currently know that rubbing alcohol has been poisoned?
> Edit, since I can't respond to your comment: There is already an information battle to convince people that traffic in and using rhino horn is not possibly good for them. If they will not believe scientists telling them that, they won't believe it's poisoned. Nothing short of a mass market and culture shift is likely to change their beliefs. Telling them it's poisoned would certainly have too many misses and too little reach to be acceptable.
1. Yes, you can respond to any comment on its own page.
2. Yes, if the horns are actually poisoned, people will learn that they're poisoned. The feedback loop here is quite short: you announce that you've poisoned the rhino horns, people scoff, say "they'd never have the guts", and eat the horns, and then a lot of those people die. Word will get around.
If they're not poisoned, then of course people won't believe that, but it's hard to blame them for accurately not believing your self-serving lies.
Don't have to kill them.
Take some rhino horn and find yourself with a couple days of crippling stomach cramps and you probably won't want to do it again.
Demand will crumble.
https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/thorny_issues/dyeing...
Alternatively could introduce a mutation that causes the elephants to not grow tusks.
Edit: this also has the effect that poachers could kill treated rhinos so that untreated rhinos are easier to find
The difficulty of actually sedating the elephant. The danger of the elephants waking up during tusks removal and hurting them self or the remover. Poachers would still kill the elephant to avoid needlessly tracking it
I wondered about the logic of doing this. Wouldn't destroying a large number of tusks just increase the scarcity and thus the value, thus incentivising more poachers to kill more elephants?
Burning the tusks wouldn't bring the elephants back to life. I would have thought instead that suddenly flooding the market with tons of cheap ivory would kill the value and reduce profit for distributors. Then again, it would probably spur demand when people see the increase in availability?!?
No easy answer, but at the crux of it, we have to remove the almighty Dollar (oh, ok - Schilling) from the whole equation somehow.
At the rate it is going, African wildlife will largely disappear even as the human population explodes. Already there are over 1.2 billion humans on the continent, and not enough food, not enough stability or prosperity. Bush meat is popular and can be bought anywhere, which of course means people are hunting and eating protected species.
There are a couple hundred thousand chimpanzees left in Africa; there were once millions. There are maybe 20,000 lions, down from half a million. There were once millions of African elephants; now they're down to half a million and still dropping. Many other species are facing similar fates.
We humans are like a blight on this planet. Maybe we should quickly develop extraterrestrial colonization technologies, get the population off world, and preserve the Earth as a giant animal sanctuary.
Likewise high end pianos, billiard balls, and such, make use of ivory.
According to surveys, the majority Chinese believe that elephant tusks grow back in the same way nails do, and they do not know that elephants need to be killed in the process.
At least there are studies to make use of synthetic ivory. Now, the use of ivory itself doesn't respond to any actual need other than a cultural one. Many materials that are cheaper can replace ivory in most use cases.
Self-declared police nations (like USA & UK & France & their allies) are so quick to intervene in Not Their Country when issues like oil or political alliances are at stake. So can we see the same level of committment (e.g. military intervention) when large scale extinction events or environmental devastation are at stake?
Soldiers lives are precious. So this is easy for me to say, but would we really be putting much at stake to drop a peacekeeping (read: anti-poacher) presence into Kenya?
The US bans and controls the sale of a lot of drugs, all we've got 50 years later is another out of control government department.
That didn't help, but I think throwing the whole country into desperate, starving poverty was a much larger contributor.
There are people protesting this in China and China banned trade of ivory. So don't damn the entire nation.
The older I get, and the more I find out about the cultural norms in certain countries; the more I want high tariffs, and flat out bans. We will get by with paying more for our stuff.
To send a message, I wouldn't mind seeing a complete ban on ivory here. Yes, gather up all that pre-19whatever Ivory, and burn it. If it sends a slight message to the Chinese, it would be worth it. And this is comming from someone who appreciates old ivory artifacts/collectables. No--I don't own any, out of moral reasons.
Teaching a dumb country, including a large swath of Americans, traditional medicine doesn't work is a whole other problem.
I would like to see guys like Zuckerburg, Buffet, and Gates send Placebo missionaries over to countries like China, and the rest. They could just try to educate these people. They could pay to put up bill boards. They could try?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/what-is-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory#Controversy_and_conserva...
And the U.S. confiscated and crushed a ton of ivory in Times Square last year.
If you're interested in education, rather than having the Great White Hopes do it, perhaps you would consider that there are people there already fighting this fight, and that countries have their own reformers and don't need an injection of Western wisdom.
http://www.upworthy.com/thanks-to-yao-ming-killing-sharks-fo...
Our guides told us that natural selection causes elephants there to grow ever smaller tusks, making them less attractive to poaching. That seemed somewhat hopeful to me: maybe evolution will happen fast enough so they can re-bounce in numbers after they produce no ivory anymore.
I heard on a podcast recently that the main cause of elephant deaths in the 1920's and 1930's was.... the manufacturing of billiard balls. Apparently it took roughly 2 elephants worth of tusks to manufacture one set of ivory billiard/snooker balls. Astounding - whereas a piano keyboard would usually only take up less than 1/2 a tusk because they used laminated sheets of ivory.
At least we can be thankful that the modern plastics industry was born out of the need to create 'artificial ivory' billiard balls which exhibited the same bounce and noise properties. Although one could argue that modern plastics are a whole ecological blight in their own right...
Huuuuuh... scientific source on that? Seems like an extremely specious claim, given the life span of elephants, and the fact that poachers are probably happy to harvest ivory even if the elephant has slightly smaller tusks.