Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsanchez1 | Hacker News Reader

It boggles the mind why the car companies lobbied to keep whale hunting when their numbers were already so low. They wanted a few more years of automatic transmission working at then-current levels, and then what? The same mass transmission failures that happened, only without anymore whales left. Poachers are similarly mind boggling. Instead of leaving a viable population to harvest more animal parts (not saying it's OK, just for the sake of argument), they hunt down every last animal then move on to other animals.

Oh, and if automatic transmission had never been invented, maybe people would actually know how to drive.

View on HN

Poachers are similarly mind boggling. Instead of leaving a viable population to harvest more animal parts ... they hunt down every last animal then move on to other animals.

Poaching makes sense to the poacher.

Take a guy I might or might not be related to. When he was growing up his family was dirt-poor and rural. Taking game out of season meant the difference between eating and starvation.

Hard on the deer, if you have a lot of people like that, granted. But laws and conservation and 'think about next year' don't mean much when your family needs to eat today.

yeah, two guys all of us might or may not be related to...

one have domesticated deer, offered good conditions for it to breed (protected it from other predators including hunters like himself) and then he and his children prospered off their cattle...

the other one just hunted his food to extinction...

guess who's children have survived to tell the story?

the other one just hunted his food to extinction

All of mine - and your - ancestors have done just that. They found new sources for food or they didn't become our ancestors.

I get what you are saying about hunting one's food to extinction, how it's a bad idea.

Do you get what _I_ am talking about when I say that poachers don't _care_ about tomorrow, that they are do poor and desperate that today is all that matters?

That's how agriculture happened, which is the biggest step forward the human race ever took.

And many groups and individuals that failed to evolve towards agriculture either died or have been thrown in slavery (as civilizations with agriculture developed more rapidly than the others without it - that's how cities started to emerge, as suddenly bigger groups could live together).

I get what you're saying too. Personally I would do anything to keep my child from starving. But extinct species are NOT in danger because of poor people that are fighting for their lives. And not all poachers are poor, not all poachers have an excuse, quite the contrary.

Agriculture might be the biggest step. But I don't know whether it was forward.

Yeah those poor guys with thousands of acres of land with fences, barns and hundreds of pounds of feed for the winter. To bad they aren't smart enough to heard animals. </sarcasm>

Owning a ranch typically isn't a poor man's occupation. It requires investments in land, improvements to the land, food for the animals when the land is unable to support them, etc.

I'm pretty sure that borism is referring to the domestication of wild animals in prehistory.

It's true now, it was true at the dawn of animal husbandry: it's more expensive to capture and domesticate wild animals than do the hunter-gatherer thing.

it's more expensive in the short run

> It boggles the mind why the car companies lobbied to keep whale hunting when their numbers were already so low. They wanted a few more years of automatic transmission working at then-current levels, and then what? The same mass transmission failures that happened, only without anymore whales left.

Tragedy of the commons.

Tragedy of the unregulated commons.

Exactly. It would make sense for them to try to get around the ban individually, but here they are trying to arrange to all hunt whales collectively. I really don't understand why they didn't all say: "Let the other companies pay for the lobbying about this".

EDIT: I think I could actually explain this pretty well in a cognitive dissonance framework. "We hunt whale. We know we're good people. Therefore, good people support hunting whale. Only bad people don't defend things they do. Therefore, we have to defend whaling."

Classic tragedy of the commons situation.

The scariest part of the history is that people had no idea they were buying dead whales.

Just like today even in food its optional to have a list of ingredients... So it seems we haven't improved much in this regard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com