

The elephant that flew - suprgeek
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29060814

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chris_va
An elephant is poached (on average) every 15 minutes in Africa.

The poachers are often not of the local area, and roam between parks based on
how easy the target seems. After a kill, they usually get out quickly and pass
the ivory to a smuggler bound for China. China's demand for traditional
medicine and ivory drives almost all of this poaching.

The poachers don't end up making a ton of money (though it's still very high
by African standards), but the smugglers and other folks net millions of
dollars.

I went and spoke with some folks in Tanzania about aerial/drone enforcement
last year. Corruption is endemic in most of the countries, and so often these
poachers have agreements with one (or many) of the local park rangers. Also,
many of the elephants are killed outside of the park boundaries, since they
are used to walking hundreds of miles between different parks (only recently,
elephant generation-wise, has human habitation started to prevent that).

An ideal solution would be to kill demand, though that will probably never
happen. Vilifying traditional medicine and ivory in China is just not feasible
in the time remaining.

Technological solutions (drones, tracking, etc) would have to be enforced at a
country level to avoid local corruption issues. It will probably not help with
elephants outside of reserves, though they are getting killed off fast enough
that the elephants are learning to stay put (which is kind of sad, changing
thousands of years of migratory patterns). Often these kills are in densely
wooded areas, but other than that drone enforcement should help, in theory.

Today, there is some aerial surveillance, but it is not sufficient for
spotting poachers at night. There are also plenty of other people who transit
through parks (people fishing the streams, etc), and it is hard to
differentiate. Multi-spectral (at least IR) and computer vision will probably
be needed to pick out a truck amidst thousands of square miles of area.

Rambling post, apologies.

~~~
judk
[http://www.wildaid.org/news/yao-ming-says-no-ivory-and-
rhino...](http://www.wildaid.org/news/yao-ming-says-no-ivory-and-rhino-horn)

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3327
Look at what some people are doing with their time/lives while others are
trying to make the next dating app.

~~~
NPMaxwell
Yup. Time to have a think.

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nly
Bitter ending in that it was the lack of education on local wildlife that lead
to this baby elephants death in the end.

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ploj
Surely a country capable of a one child policy must be capable of a no ivory
policy?

~~~
judk
The ivory consumers are members of the dictatorship and their friends.

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arjn
Sad ending. However its heartening that someone tried to save the baby
elephant. The world needs to do so much more to protect wildlife. It seems
things have gotten so much worse over the last decade or two.

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disputin
Can drone practice take place on poachers?

~~~
negamax
Won't it be better to educate people and crackdown on buyers of animal
products. Although poachers are doing the dirty work; they are not entirely at
fault here. Drones and use of technology can make their work tough; but it
won't deter them.

~~~
dredmorbius
There are a number of factors at play.

One is the demand for ivory and other products derived from endangered
animals, much of it driven by new wealth in China (but also elsewhere).

Another is the lack of economic opportunity throughout much of sub-Saharan
Africa. As I recently realized doing the maths, Kenya's electrical generation
amounts to about 37 watts per person. That's enough to run a typical laptop,
maybe. With projected wind potential of up to 1 GW, wind could supply over 2/3
of _total present generating capacity_ in the country. A gigawatt is about the
size of a large coal or nuclear plant. More:
[http://redd.it/2dm7b0](http://redd.it/2dm7b0)

And there's corruption and the lack of resources in policing wildlife refuges
and reserves. I'm watching the opening episode of _Years of Living
Dangerously_ , one storyline follows a similar history evolving in Indonesia
with palm-oil plantations taking over virgin equatorial rainforest with
nominally protected status. Over 80% of the "protected" forest is described as
destroyed or degraded by slash-and-burn, conversion to farmland, logging, or
other activities (17,000 hectare remain of 85,000 hectare total).

The pressures of people, industrialization, economic growth, and other factors
on the planet are unsustainable and have been recognized by many in the
ecological and other communities for decades. General awareness is only slowly
starting to leak out.

