Call me cold, but this strikes me as a situation that can be managed by altering the risk:reward landscape of poaching. Shoot people on sight who are poaching, and greatly increase the number of game wardens.
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.
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".