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Comment by MisterOctober | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing gets me furious. I mean, I realize that folks gotta eat, but damn... poaching / stealing individuals of a threatened species that is also one of the coolest animals on the planet -- it just shows no respect. Same thing goes for elephant poachers, etc.

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If you are so hungry you need to steal then you'd steal food, not exotic inedible animals.

I hear the same argument about ivory poachers being poor people faced with no other choice but it's simply not true, the amount of money gained from killing one animal is 20 years salary, it's not a choice between going hungry or not.

Crime expert, huh?

How stupid someone has to be to steal someone's food day in day out (and eventually get caught, beaten or worse) when they can "steal" something that belongs to no individual and get away with it?

If the animals actually had a private owner, poachers would mostly get caught and the island wouldn't be closed to tourists.

I’ve been hanging out with comservationists the last few months - universally I hear the same things. Poachers are young men who start due to need and stay due to greed.

My sense is most of such poaching is organized crime. The foot soldiers, poachers, are one end of a supply chain. My guess is they make a few hundred bucks, not 35K. Beyond poachers are transporters, a dozen checkpoints who are paid off, a marketer/dealmaker and an eventual buyer who would have paid 35K.

At least that's how it works in India (Sandalwood, ivory etc.,) so I'm guessing this is standard modus operandi across the world.

The point I'm trying to make is, ivory poachers are indeed poor people. However, the amount of money they make from killing one animal is good enough for a week or month's worth of living. Nowhere near 20 years salary. So they are driven by hunger.

The bigger players, politicians, corporations are the ones driven by greed. The movie Blood Diamond is quite accurate IMO.

You are making the argument that he makes more money than necessary just for food.

It could be that you have—in theory at least—two options:

1) Try to plant corn. 2) Kill a rhino.

There is no option here that makes exactly $3 or whatever is may be that your food need is for that timestamp.

I think he means "people got to eat" as in you need some kind of income.

I really disagree with your perspective, what you need to recognise is that people in the West effectively have a system of wage-slavery over other places, and it's based on chance not some deep system of justice. I love nature and animals and extinction fills me with existential sadness but at the same time if someone wants to kill Komodo dragons and the alternative is making 5k a year by being worked to death with no security, my aesthetic sadness about declining beauty feels a bit smug, and I certainly can't be moral about it. Until the world has anything approaching rough equality, fair enough go massacre white rhinos if that's what it takes to get a fraction of the freedom I was born with.

Do you eat meat?

How is killing chicken not worse than capturing lizards?

Komodo dragons are at risk of extinction, chickens are not.

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