
Kenya announces death penalty for poachers - chirau
https://healthypets.mercola.com/sites/healthypets/archive/2018/06/26/death-penalty-for-poachers.aspx
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jstarfish
The anti-poaching team is already outmanned and outgunned. This will do
wonders for their numbers.

This means poachers now have nothing to lose if they get caught (they'll get
killed if captured), so they might as well try to blaze their way out of the
situation. Anti-poachers will themselves become endangered.

We tried this in the US wrt kidnapping in the 60s. All it resulted in was dead
kids, since kidnappers had nothing to lose if ransom demands were not met--
whether they release the victim or not, they were going to fry for the crime
either way. We had to scale back the punishment to provide some incentive to
release victims alive.

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kikoreis
You write the 60s, but wasn't the FKA passed in the 1930s?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Kidnapping_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Kidnapping_Act)

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jstarfish
That is true. I was thinking only of when kidnapping was reclassified as a
non-capital offense, not when the original act passed.

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cornholio
> the Wildlife Conservation Act, put in place in 2013, carries a life sentence
> or fine of $200,000 for offenders; however, the sentences weren’t acting as
> a strong enough deterrence.

Clearly, a life sentence is an extremely strong deterrent. You will not gain
significant deterrence from capital punishment, people that are committing the
crime clearly don't expect to be caught. Or they have such desperate
circumstances so as to completely skew their risk/reward perception - case in
which capital punishment can even be seen as immoral.

Therefore, attention should be focused on properly enforcing the existing law,
making sure the fines are applied _in addition_ to strong prison sentences,
going after the ring leaders, their profits and cronies in office, etcetera.

You cannot fake a working judicial system with political theater and draconian
sentences applied only to those poor enough to get caught.

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Semirhage
I agree, unless this empowers anti-poachers to use lethal force more freely in
the field, then I’m all for it. I realize that sadly, the poacher on the
ground is the low man on the economic totem of poaching, but they’re also the
sharp end of that stick. We don’t really have time to change and improve the
relevant societies before there’s nothing left to protect. We should have been
doing that more actively for decades, but now that it’s come to this, we need
snipers.

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southphillyman
Not sure how I feel about this since it hits the most vulnerable of the
criminals hardest, the low level poacher getting pennies on the dollar for the
ivory or skin he is procuring. It's similar to the war on drug approach which
gives lengthy sentences to the lowly corner dealers while those who control
the market on a macro level rarely get caught or receive good plea deals when
they do.

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DLA
Fantastic news. Nobody needs rhino horn "supplements", ivory anything or
giraffe skin items. Killing these endangered animals for pure vanity and/or
commercial gain is barbaric. Time for poachers to get what's coming to them.
Now this needs to happen in Tanzanian law also.

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WA
The problem with the death penalty is that sooner or later, someone innocent
might get killed.

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magduf
If someone is caught out in a wild area with endangered animals and has
poaching equipment on them (i.e., a large rifle), I don't see how you can
argue that they're innocent.

We're not talking about a murder in a first-world urban area where you didn't
catch the suspect red-handed.

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Nicety
Saying that we can't penalize the poacher because his boss may still be
unpunished isn't going to convince me to go easy. Also the idea that poachers
will somehow become even more violent against anti poachers doesn't hold much
weight either. Poachers have never hesitated to use a gun.

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aurizon
At some point poaching an endangered species should be a capital offence. This
is irreversible species death we speak of. I know we can in theory sequence
them and create eggs and somehow raise to term - in some future time and cost.
So once the animal hits a critical rating - this death penalty kicks in, and I
mean kicks in hard. All those geezers with rhino horn daggers - stomped by a
rhino. This would limit the demand - those guys like to swagger with their
rhino horn daggers - make it legal to shoot them from ambush...

I would like to see a world where rhino horn could be farmed in tissue farms,
same for ocelot furs etc, never any need to kill an animal for body parts

