
How Elephant Poop Is Helping Nab Ivory Poachers - adamnemecek
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/elephant-poop-helping-nab-ivory-poachers-180955664/
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chris_va
This may help at a policy level, but I feel like it is solving the wrong
problem.

Most of the time, poaching is easy to discover because there is a dead
elephant on the ground missing its tusks. These game parks already know they
have a problem, and often it is facilitated by an insider.

One way it could be useful is if you can trace a set of ivory back to a single
poaching network, to understand the network's reach.

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fit2rule
>One way it could be useful is if you can trace a set of ivory back to a
single poaching network, to understand the network's reach.

And that is exactly what they're doing - mapping the ivory trade back to the
regions where its occurring, so that they can indeed find out where the
network operates and therefore allocate resources to stopping it.

Discovering that a majority of the tusks came from a particular park _is
stopping the network where it operates_. Governments can go to those parks and
start their investigation into why there is so much ivory coming from their
area - uprooting the corrupt networks that allow it to occur.

