
Zero elephants poached in a year in top Africa wildlife park - hhs
https://www.apnews.com/ef25debd7ab74b7ca5dc3fe9692c1fa8
======
jdietrich
African elephant populations are very healthy, just barely qualifying for IUCN
"vulnerable" status. They're not a significant conservation risk, but they are
a big money-maker for Western wildlife charities and African governments. The
genus has more than enough protected habitat and more than enough monitoring.

The Borneo, Indian and Sri Lankan elephants are all endangered, while the
Sumatran elephant is critically endangered. The Sumatran elephant is
overwhelmingly not being poached for ivory, but being killed due to conflict
with agriculture and human settlement; similar problems affect the rest of the
Asian elephant population. Only a small proportion of conservation efforts are
directed towards this critical but extremely difficult issue - how do you
protect elephants from people, while also protecting people from elephants?

~~~
beaner
If the protection of wildlife is profit-driven by governments, I'm fine with
that. Maybe these other places where endangerment is a problem can learn from
the other ones. If they can make more money from milking foreigners for
protection, rather than land encroachment, maybe they wouldn't hesitate to try
it.

------
wincy
Interestingly, rich people who want to hunt African wildlife help bolster and
reduce poaching in these giant wildlife reserves. Providing locals an economic
incentive to stop poachers actually works really well.

Here’s the site for if you want to help Niassa protect elephants.
[http://niassahunter.com/](http://niassahunter.com/)

~~~
ImaCake
Many people are surprised by how hunters are natural allies of
conservationists. In Africa, hunters bring in precious money to the thousands
of community run conservancies. And the North American Model of wildlife
conservation considers the rights and cooperation of hunters to be an
essential component in it's successful defense of conservation.

~~~
wincy
My wife worked as a nanny for a surgeon who went on these expeditions. He had
stuffed lions and antelope in his house, it was pretty wild. The pricing isn’t
listed on these, but here’s a site that gives people an idea of the huge
amount of money these hunters are willing to pay. An exportable elephant
trophy is $60,000 plus hundreds of dollars a day for general amenities. A
basic package is more like $2500, where you’re hunting things like wildebeests
and warthogs.

[https://africahuntlodge.com/hunting-packages/elephant-
hunts](https://africahuntlodge.com/hunting-packages/elephant-hunts)

The whole Cecil the Lion thing shows what happens when the general public gets
wind of these hunting expeditions, and negatively impacted the revenue for
these preserves, unfortunately.

------
riffraff
I wonder how much China's ban on ivory has had an effect on illegal poaching.
According to an article last year[0], demand went down significantly over
2018, and it seems possible that there was a "snowball" effect on consumers.

[0]
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/09/wildlife-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/09/wildlife-
watch-news-ivory-demand-reduction-china-ban/)

------
mistrial9
'Political will is a key reason for the success, Bampton said, with
Mozambique’s president keen to see poaching reduced.'

=> "Do not give up"

------
29athrowaway
The most proficient elephant killer is Allan Savory.

He killed 40,000 elephants "to prevent desertification", only to make
desertification worse. That is about 5% to 10% of the entire world elephant
population.

~~~
neonate
You didn't mention that this was in the 1960s, that he acknowledged it was a
terrible mistake, and that his subsequent work has been based on trying to
correct it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory)

I'd never heard of Allan Savory, but this took less than a minute to look up.

~~~
29athrowaway
Does that change the fact that he killed 40,000 elephants for the wrong
reasons?

~~~
neonate
Of course not. It means you misleadingly gave one side of the story. I doubt
you'd like it if someone took the worst thing you ever did, defined you
publicly by that, and didn't mention your efforts to make amends.

Look at this way. When I read your comment I thought, "what a monster. How is
it possible that such a monster exists in this world." That's why I went to
look him up. But when I read two or three other facts about the story, that
feeling went away and was replaced by the feeling that I had been tricked. Had
you mentioned that this happened over 50 years ago, your comment wouldn't have
had that effect, because today's knowledge and moral consciousness, both of
which you're relying on, didn't exist back then. But instead you wrote in the
present tense, obfuscating that. You also used the word "proficient", implying
that killing elephants was his main goal. And you put his stated goal in scare
quotes. That just seems like a lot of misleading for a short comment.

~~~
nobodyandproud
Perhaps the story isn’t very one-sided, if one digs deeper.

Instead of testing the elephant culling hypothesis, the man ran wholesale with
an idea that appealed to his senses.

He was later involved in politics and essentially called himself a terrorist,
if he were black. Which pretty much got him the boot.

He’s now advocating for grazing patterns and movements to “mimic” natural
patterns, even though the evidence for his theories are thin.

The man has a habit of hubris yet manages to retain influence, which is not to
be lightly ignored.

