Kenya announces death penalty for poachers | Hacker News Reader

Kenya announces death penalty for poachers

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46 pointschirau25 comments

The anti-poaching team is already outmanned and outgunned. This will do wonders for their numbers.

This means poachers now have nothing to lose if they get caught (they'll get killed if captured), so they might as well try to blaze their way out of the situation. Anti-poachers will themselves become endangered.

We tried this in the US wrt kidnapping in the 60s. All it resulted in was dead kids, since kidnappers had nothing to lose if ransom demands were not met-- whether they release the victim or not, they were going to fry for the crime either way. We had to scale back the punishment to provide some incentive to release victims alive.

You write the 60s, but wasn't the FKA passed in the 1930s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Kidnapping_Act

That is true. I was thinking only of when kidnapping was reclassified as a non-capital offense, not when the original act passed.

> the Wildlife Conservation Act, put in place in 2013, carries a life sentence or fine of $200,000 for offenders; however, the sentences weren’t acting as a strong enough deterrence.

Clearly, a life sentence is an extremely strong deterrent. You will not gain significant deterrence from capital punishment, people that are committing the crime clearly don't expect to be caught. Or they have such desperate circumstances so as to completely skew their risk/reward perception - case in which capital punishment can even be seen as immoral.

Therefore, attention should be focused on properly enforcing the existing law, making sure the fines are applied in addition to strong prison sentences, going after the ring leaders, their profits and cronies in office, etcetera.

You cannot fake a working judicial system with political theater and draconian sentences applied only to those poor enough to get caught.

I agree, unless this empowers anti-poachers to use lethal force more freely in the field, then I’m all for it. I realize that sadly, the poacher on the ground is the low man on the economic totem of poaching, but they’re also the sharp end of that stick. We don’t really have time to change and improve the relevant societies before there’s nothing left to protect. We should have been doing that more actively for decades, but now that it’s come to this, we need snipers.

Not sure how I feel about this since it hits the most vulnerable of the criminals hardest, the low level poacher getting pennies on the dollar for the ivory or skin he is procuring. It's similar to the war on drug approach which gives lengthy sentences to the lowly corner dealers while those who control the market on a macro level rarely get caught or receive good plea deals when they do.

Fantastic news. Nobody needs rhino horn "supplements", ivory anything or giraffe skin items. Killing these endangered animals for pure vanity and/or commercial gain is barbaric. Time for poachers to get what's coming to them. Now this needs to happen in Tanzanian law also.

But is the death penalty really a reasonable response?

Well, what is a more reasonable response to genocide?

And not just committing genocide, but they are profiting from it.

Kind of like punching Nazi's - I'm willing to overlook the idea that it might not be entirely reasonable as long as it puts a stop to the thing.

Genocide means wiping a nation or people and has expanded in modern times to cover mass killings for various political reasons.

Mass killing of animals is not genocide in any form. Your philosophy might deem them equivalent and I respect that view, but you should accept it's an extreme, minority position.

The only reason "genocide" doesn't technically apply here is because these creatures are not humans.

But unlike human genocide where only some group of humans gets wiped out in large numbers, leaving plenty of other humans walking the planet, here it's much worse: an entire species is being wiped out to complete extinction. It's demonstrably far, far worse.

I think a key distinction here is that their intentions are not to wipe out all animals of a species, which would cause them to lose their income.

Genocide is a relatively new term, created to describe the Nazis. It combines the word genos, which means race or tribe, and -cide, death.

> It's demonstrably far, far worse.

The major problem with genocide is not the disparition of a culture or ethic type, it's the killing of scores of humans that have value unto themselves.

In contrast, the vast majority of legal systems and societies in existence today do not recognize the mere killing of an animal as wrong. Humans widely believe they have the right to take the life of an animal, as long as it'd done humanely, for sensible reasons and does not threaten biodiversity.

So genocide and extinction are fundamentally different, orthogonal moral issues.

Reasonable might be to move higher up the food chain and impose life sentences on the people with the dollars ordering these species to be killed.

It is just a bowl of tragedy down in the trenches.

“When it comes to execution, I think people need to understand that the death penalty is not a humane act.” -- Robert Dunham in http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180604-is-there-a-humane-w...

The enshrinement of human rights violations in public policy is never fantastic news.

The problem with the death penalty is that sooner or later, someone innocent might get killed.

Yes, agree here. Big problem. A long prison term to allow for all due process and appeals should be used.

If someone is caught out in a wild area with endangered animals and has poaching equipment on them (i.e., a large rifle), I don't see how you can argue that they're innocent.

We're not talking about a murder in a first-world urban area where you didn't catch the suspect red-handed.

To be consistent, every buyer of poached items should also get the death penalty. Do we want this?

Well considering that poaching is going to result in species extinction, while there's absolutely no danger of humans going extinct any time soon, I don't see the problem.

This can also be seen as tranfering blame to the poorest of the poaching chain - the poachers themselves. The smugglers and especially buyers won't be affected by this and are just as guilty. Do they get the noose too?

I'm not being argumentative, I am curious how far your belief this is a good idea goes.

Agree, and feel sad we need to go here. This transfer to the bottom of the chain is a real and difficult problem for sure. But at some point is the supply of people who will do this crime gets cut off then the entire supply chain falls apart. In an ideal world it would be best to target the kingpins, but we all know how difficult this can be with their use of lawyers, cut-outs, front companies, and other evasive moves. It sucks that humans will hunt a species to extinction for pure vanity (skins, jeweler and horn potions).

Agree further with you and maxxxxx that smugglers and buyers of said animal contraband should be severely punished. But again, that's so far after the fact and there are so many possible outlets for these goods that a demand side solution will just not work.

The Chinese government, if they really wanted to cut down on ivory and rhino supplement trade, could enact and enforce severe buy-side punishments.

The sad fact is, there is one and only one choke point in this entire global supply chain and that's the guy with the gun that chooses of his own free will to kill one of these animals for money. Stop him and the entire enterprise folds. Yes, I know it's harsh, but other efforts are just not working.

Saying that we can't penalize the poacher because his boss may still be unpunished isn't going to convince me to go easy. Also the idea that poachers will somehow become even more violent against anti poachers doesn't hold much weight either. Poachers have never hesitated to use a gun.

At some point poaching an endangered species should be a capital offence. This is irreversible species death we speak of. I know we can in theory sequence them and create eggs and somehow raise to term - in some future time and cost. So once the animal hits a critical rating - this death penalty kicks in, and I mean kicks in hard. All those geezers with rhino horn daggers - stomped by a rhino. This would limit the demand - those guys like to swagger with their rhino horn daggers - make it legal to shoot them from ambush...

I would like to see a world where rhino horn could be farmed in tissue farms, same for ocelot furs etc, never any need to kill an animal for body parts

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