No, it wouldn't. Besides the ethical problems, it's not possible economically and zoologically. I'm kind of disturbed that this suggestion is so prevalent.
I don't think you should be. I'm glad people are thinking up solutions, even if they turn out not to work.
It isn't an unreasonable naive idea. After all, domestication (turning them into symbiotes) has helped some species enormously. Others that could not be domesticated (e.g. whales) have survived only thanks to technological change. Even "wild" animals like deer and trout survive through a symbiotic relationship.
Yes, I understand it doesn't make sense for elephants in particular, and of course domesticating some animals usually spells doom for others. So I understand there's an argument to be made that domestication is inherently bad -- one I disagree with but there's a legit case to be made. But I'm glad people actually care.
It's fundamentally misguided and it's not a solution. Between elephant extinction and elephant suffering, I will go with extinction every time.
Elephants are important for the ecosystem, IIRC something like 70% of all species in certain areas rely on them. If you remove them from the ecosystem by domesticating them, you are doing a damaging the ecosystem in multiple way.
No, elephants can't be contained on a farm. They are meant to roam whereby they disseminate seed of certain plants that rely on them to be disseminated.
Is that enough of a reason? Libertarianism is the answer only when you care about simple answers, not about working answers.
I'm not sure why you think this is an either/or proposition. I mean, I accept that farming elephants isn't practical for a lot of reasons, but no one's talking about putting every living elephant on a farm.
[1]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianoce...
[edit, it was rhino ivory and not elephant ivory the rancher is producing]
Also its not really viable. It takes forever to grow tusks (think decades).
And you are right, fundamentally this would just lead to extinction of elephants in the wild, because poachers would kill them.
But let's take a step back and realize that we really don't need to be enslaving another species.
Prevent wild elephants from going extinct.
> Are we trying to prevent suffering of an intelligent species or what?
No. If that were humanity's goal, we would have stopped eating pork.
humans aren't raising pigs to prevent their extinction tho.
> No. If that were humanity's goal, we would have stopped eating pork.
The tides are slowly turning but we shouldn't be enslaving yet another species.
We don't need to hunt wild boar for meat thanks to factory farming of pork. Tracking a boar in the woods just for its meat makes no economic sense. We hunt the boar mainly for the experience of killing a dangerous and intelligent animal. But selling experience is hard to scale, esp. because only a very small subset of humanity has been allowed to engage in that sort of hunt (formerly by legally enforced social class distinctions and land ownership, more recently by cultural norms).
As a result, the hunting of boar is kept to a sustainable level.
As for the elephant, we don't need the meat either. And if hunting were only for the trophy hunter's experience, it would be sustainable. But the problem is the ivory: plastic is not a good enough substitute, so prices for the real thing are astronomical, and industrial-scale poaching of wild elephants makes economic sense for the unscrupulous.
If we farm-raise enough elephants to drop the price of ivory to the point that poachers could gain more from other illegal pursuits - illegal mining, stealing non-ferrous metals from construction sites, tapping into oil pipelines etc. - we would save the wild elephant.
The point of producing them on a ranch is to make poaching uneconomical while at the same time producing enough for the market while remaining economically viable. Poachers, on the other hand, will hunt the species down to extinction, that's their incentive.
How does it achieve that goal tho? The price of raising an elephant on a farm is quite a bit and it takes forever. The price for a poacher is essentially zero.
The price for a poacher is not zero. They risk life, limb and prison (not that I feel sorry for them) but it's not risk free.
Yeah, I remain unconvinced based on this.
> The price for a poacher is not zero.
The price of life in these areas is effectively zero. It's not the higher ups who do the killing, they get some locals to do it.
You can also try to breed faster growing critters. (That's a very long term project, though.)
I mean, cows, pigs, chickens (dogs and cats) are the most docile creatures on earth. How would we enslave, rape, raise, slaughter them if they were angry and combatant and weren't submissive?
Breeding does wonders.
Check out any wild cattle and you'll see how easily, fearlessly they stomp their predators to death.
As for ethical problems, I see no difference between an elephant and a pig. Both are one of the smartest animals on earth. Yet, bacon! :D Given that first world countries enjoy their 99% factory farmed abominations of animal flesh, I'd say ethics was decided as a non-problem by look-the-other-way anthropocentric market agents.
edit: checkout Temple Grandin work with cattle. you can have a farm with hundreds of milk cows and have 2 people working on it (part time vet that's making all the cows pregnant and managing their calves, and one full time employee). her methods made industrial milk farms manage themselves. cows practically go to the milking robot alone, never stopping, never panicking. when I saw this being done with my own eyes, no wonder family farms can't compete without huge subsidies.
Elephants are large herbivores, we are adept at raising large herbivores for meat and other products. Adding elephants to the list that contains cattle and horses is a logical step.
An elephant can be like 8x bigger than either of those.
> we are adept at raising large herbivores for meat and other products.
You realize that cows contribute more to global warming than cars right? We should be scaling these productions down.
> Adding elephants to the list that contains cattle and horses is a logical step.
Do you know how the domestication process works?
Comparing cars with cow is unhelpful without the correct context. At minimum we should distinguish between meat cows raised on animal feed, milk cows, and grass cows (which in places are helping the environment to reduce overgrowth). Then we need to compare those to other diets.
Regardless, cars will always be worse per person compared to eating cows. I would stick with the domestication argument.