Photo of butchered rhino is this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner
bbc.com
bbc.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...
A comment search for "You guys should consider donating" yields 9 highly similar results with your name attached.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=You%20guys%20should%20consider...
Mander used his life savings and liquidated his investments and assets to fund the start-up and running costs of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation – an organisation dedicated to the protection and preservation of wildlife in some of the world's most volatile regions.
I'm sold. He sounds like an awesome dude.
I'll set up a donation as soon as I get home.
What do you, or anyone reading your comment, get out of it?
I'm a tiny bit pissed off, but perhaps that's just morning grumpiness. But I'm also honestly curious.
Farm them for horns (removing the horn is painless [0], once the horn is removed release into the wild), tax the production of horns, use the tax money to find conservation and security.
The increased supply will decrease prices, making the hunting of rhino less profitable.
The argument against this is that increased supply will increase demand. Also, its not hard to see corruption eating away the profits, and therefore investment into conservation.
[0] http://www.news24.com/Africa/Zimbabwe/does-it-hurt-a-rhino-w...
If you (as a poacher) spend a day tracking down a rhino only to find out it has already been de-horned then you shoot it so that you reduce the chances of the next hunt ending up with another de-horned rhino and a higher chance of it ending with a horned rhino.
It's sad that we're not advance enough to become a higher being that can co-live with other beings without ... contention.
When I was in elementary school, my the text book and so my teacher often use the phase 'Human conquered the nature' (Or 'conquers', my memory is fuzzy about that).
Then as I grow up, I start to wounder, is that actually true? We're the part of the nature. How can we label ourself as a conqueror if we're part of it?
But that phase seems imprinted in lot's of peoples mind deeply: We're the conqueror, and so the nature is just a pool of resource for us to use.
Since we're the conqueror, we can decide what to do, what not.
That rhino's horn is nothing but a resource to us. We need it's horn, so we collect it. Killing the rhino is just the process of collecting. So we have no feeling killing it, neither care about that rhino will die in the process.
And sometime, we not just do that to rhinos, because as conqueror, we decide which or who will be conquered.
Anyone who cares about the environment or ethical treatment of animals should be reading labels and avoiding all products containing palm oil.
I suspect this is a pattern repeated throughout the universe. Once evolution kicks up a species with the behavioural flexibility to escape ecological limits on its reproductive success, it's likely just a biological inevitability that it will pullulate uncontrollably. It will thus wipe out everything in its path until its own nest is fouled and it dies back.
If the species in question happens to be one that, like ours, has attained that flexibility via higher-order cognition, it will invent justifying rationalisations for its destructive activities (destiny, economic growth etc). But in the end it's just biology.
Is there anything that can really end all life on Earth short of the earth being ejected from the solar system or things of equivalent magnitude?
Sure, we might nuke humans and most animals into extinction, but life would survive. Do we know if new complex animals would evolve again "quickly" (meaning hundreds of millions of years)?
I share his sentiment. Such luck we have with this amazing planet, and all we do is destroy it. Humanity is disgusting.
Either way, thanks for the positive message.
[1] http://sci.waikato.ac.nz/evolution/AnimalEvolution.shtml
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary...
True.
> Billions of years of nothing but mindless senseless suffering and death in the natural world
False ("nothing but" signals either a silly rhetorical flourish, or profound ignorance of the "natural world", which contains joys and sorrows in vast and complex patterns resisting such narrow simplification).
> the fact we can try at all is possibly the most special thing that has ever happened in the entire universe
Daft if you ignore "possibly" - we know almost nothing even of other regions of our own galaxy, let alone 'the entire universe'. Trivially true if you admit "possibly".
All this aside, however amazing humanity undoubtedly is, it is failing, perhaps inevitably, at the signal task of our age, which is to maintain civilisation without destroying our home. There is no sign thus far that this can or will improve.