Footage shows young elephants being captured for Chinese zoos
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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 animal and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor these cuties [5][6]. It's a good gift.
You should also check out http://reddit.com/r/babyelephantgifs for a daily dose of elephant gifs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander
[3] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust
[5] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp...
That's an interesting moral question.
> That's an interesting moral question.
It's not actually. The poaching groups are connected to the likes of Boko Haram http://www.nationalgeographic.com/tracking-ivory/article.htm.... So it's two birds with one stone really.
Also the poachers kill anti-poachers regularly
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/25/two-wild...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/17/leading-...
It's a bit like asking whether a human life is more valuable than a sack of money when a bank robber goes down shooting. Either law enforcement has teeth or there are no laws.
> Nothing is ever black and white.
It's a valid point, I do agree it's worth thinking about, I've heard of the movement before.
But it means you are very pro poacher though. Every animal they kill often saves hundreds.
Interesting outlook.
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fight-against-...
"Between 2010 and 2012, ivory hunters shot down an astonishing 100,000 elephants across Africa—more than 60 percent of central Africa’s elephant population has been lost during the ten-year period beginning in 2002—according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences."
http://www.bagheera.com/inthewild/van_anim_elephant.htm
"Demand for ivory, combined with habitat loss from human settlement, has led to a dramatic decline in elephant populations in the last few decades. In 1930, there were between 5 and 10 million African elephants. By 1979, there were 1.3 million.
In 1989, when they were added to the international list of the most endangered species, there were about 600,000 remaining, less than one percent of their original number.
Asian elephants were never as abundant as their African cousins, and today they are even more endangered than African elephants. At the turn of the century, there were an estimated 200,000 Asian elephants. Today there are probably no more than 35,000 to 40,000 left in the wild."
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So, we ask the question: Why save endangered species?
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150715-why-save-an-endanger...
1) We like them, 2) The biosphere provides trillions of dollars to the global economy, 3) Loss of species impacts ecological systems and puts us at risk as we depend on them for survival.
Why is this the question? Why is "extinction" so important? The fate of most species is extinction anyway.
> "...1) We like them, 2) The biosphere provides trillions of dollars to the global economy, 3) Loss of species impacts ecological systems and puts us at risk as we depend on them for survival."
Is there a non-selfish reason, that is morally justifiable, for preventing species extinction?
When natural systems can no longer sustain life, that life dies out. This can happen when there are no longer enough natural resources to support said life. But this does not necessarily happen quickly. The cause could be drought or famine or climate chane, resulting in lack of an environment suitable to life. This can cause the deterioration of a species to the point of disease, starvation, cannibalization, and other painful processes.
Let's take an example. Assume that some new disease affected a wolf population in a given area. Once those wolves died out, the lack of natural predators would cause other species (say, deer) to reproduce abundantly, and then overgraze, which would then affect the growth of forests, which then would affect the ecology sustaining a myriad of species that live in said forest. Assuming those species attempted to adapt by migration, they may be adversely affected by other species in a new region, or adversely affect those species themselves, setting off new chain reactions.
This is not a theory. This is a real problem affecting the northeast united states. Except it wasn't disease that killed off the wolves: it was humans.
Importantly, this isn't poaching. This was lawful collection of elephants. Morality aside, this does provide funding for cash- strapped nations and some of that funding goes to protection of stressed animal populations.
Yeah let's not do that.
I personally dislike zoos and don't visit them. At the same time, I'm not comfortable telling you how you should feel.
Is an elephant’s life worth more than someone who poaches endangered animals? Probably.
Also, these poachers are usually armed and willing to kill for their poach. The best defense against an idiot with a WWII export AK variant is a smarter person with a much longer-range weapon.
According to The Law of Scarcity isn't the life of an elephant more valuable than a human?
I think the moral takeaway is not that the lives of these people is worth less than that of an animal. It's that they are breaking knowingly and are often murderers themselves.
Don't get me wrong, I happily hunt and fish. I clean and process dead animals with great frequency. The difference, in this case, is that elephants are truly at risk of extinction.
The people in the video capturing calves are not poachers - they are Parks and Wildlife rangers. The sale to zoos are entirely legal in both countries, but might be contravening CITES rules.
After all, if you can make tons of money selling rhino horns (but know you’ll get shot if you kill an existing rhino to do it), people might start putting a lot of money into rhino farms, which could be good for the global population size.
Besides, we're not aiming for pure population count... imagine the shitty quality of life an "ivory farm elephant" would have? And after they take the horn or tusk, what then? Meat?
You don’t have to kill an elephant (or rhino) to take their tusks. Presumably their quality of life would be no worse than that of e.g. cows.
So they can be farmed and have decent lives. The trick is that if the price is high they're still going to get poached. If the price is low then it'll be too costly to feed them and it won't be worth it in the first place.
If it's legal and is good money -- what are you going to do? Get it to be little money, or illegal and too much trouble. If reducing this phenomenon is your goal, that is.
I'm against all zoos personally, but who cares if they are for chinese zoos?
Britain has a bunch of zoos with elephants, rhinos and all kinds of animals from africa. Is it bad because it is for the chinese?
China is building cities at a tremendous rate, and many of those cities are building zoos. The existing captive breeding programs and animal-swap programs are simply not capable of supplying those new zoos with the larger animals with slow breeding rates. In any case, going out to poach animals from the wild is cheaper.
It's not bad because Chinese, but bad because it's going faster than the existing systems can handle.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/09/493295430/episo...
To put it in a nutshell, they are not allowed to buy and sell animals. Aquariums can trade animals with other aquariums but no money should change hands. Zoos depend solely on goodwill, as even trade is banned. So when an animal is born in a zoo, if they don't need it or cannot keep it, they donate it to another zoo who needs it. And if a zoo needs an animals, they put the word out that they require one and some other zoo donates them one of theirs.
Every one of us continues to be cruel and complicit, multiple times a day in the the torture and killing of several living beings.
There are a few degrees of seperation from the actual act but each of us, personally, are the direct reason it happens to a specific other living being.
Look inside you and at your life before you judge others. For cruelty isn't just what is in sight.
Edit: Oh, getting some downvotes, just saying that it is a bit hypocritically to go to a western zoo (not saying you all are) and watch elephants probably acquired in a similar fashion.
https://www.thedodo.com/baby-elephants-zimbabwe-zoos-9847784...
I'm just trying to determine where the line is.
I went to a zoo a couple months ago. The elephants' tusks were cut, presumably so that the elephants wouldn't be able to impale each other. That was a bit too sad for me to want to go back to zoos anymore.
Hint: the same is being done in mass animal production - pigs have their tails capped to prevent cannibalism from boredom, and chickens get "debeaked" (yeah it's an actual word). Male chicks actually get gassed or shredded alive (!) to death right after hatching because they're fairly useless for the meat production. Sows are often restricted in movement after giving birth so they cannot accidentally crush the piglets due to the litters being too large, and the conditions on transports to slaughterhouses... let's just say that's bordering on torture.
This isn't true. Most male chicks are slaughtered as broilers, just like most female chicks. (In fact broilers were initially the males that were culled from the egg-laying females.)
But yeah, that video is disturbing.
To be clear, I'm not pro-factory farming or chicken cruelty. Just saying that when you buy a broiler chicken, it's about 50% likely to be a male.
Might be possible that's a German uniqueness, can't tell about the US.
For older chickens, yes. The difference is important.
Ok? No. It would be slightly less terrible though. And if the elephants had "ok" living conditions, not like cages where they can't move.
> I'm just trying to determine where the line is.
Like with most things, there isn't really one.
> I went to a zoo a couple months ago. The elephants' tusks were cut, presumably so that the elephants wouldn't be able to impale each other. That was a bit too sad for me to want to go back to zoos anymore.
I don't go to zoos and I wish they were closed.
1. They were rescued from another facility that cut the tusks.
2. The tusks weren't actually cut. You don't elaborate on what you mean by "cut," perhaps you mean you see the large base of tusks but very short and clearly cut by a saw or something. But if you just mean the tusks are very short or absent, that's actually somewhat common, especially in Asian elephants.
3. Depending on where this zoo is, the zoo could have been worried about poachers. There have been incidents where poachers have broken into zoos and killing elephants and rhinos for their ivory.
In response to your question about capturing elephants in the wild, my response is that the primary moral imperative here is the preservation of the species. If the limited capture of a small number of elephants was being done as part of a plan to reintroduce elephants to a region where they have gone extinct, I would be in favor of that. If these elephants were going to a respected zoo as part of a breeding program with goals to re-vitalize the species, I would be in favor of that. I would even consider arguments that taking a few elephants to a respected zoo for research or education purposes would be better for the long-term survival of the species, though I generally reject that idea because there are a sufficient number of elephants available for rescue that are not capable of entering/returning to the wild.
As an example, the African elephants at the Omaha zoo previously lived in a wildlife preserve in Swaziland. But a record drought threatened their survival. By moving the elephants to a zoo, they reduced the elephant population in the park, leaving enough resources for the other animals in the park to survive. http://www.omaha.com/living/zoo/year-later-elephants-have-ma...
It may be to prevent someone killing the animal for the ivory.
A French zoo had one of its rhinos killed for its horn: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/03/09/a...
Not sure on your logic here.
Perhaps the developed world could recognize the unfairness of the situation and help Chinese zoos with care standards and loans/donations of elephants from zoos that have them.