This to me is a sign of a kind of twisted morality and twisted priorities that urban, well-off people have in regards to animal rights. In a nutshell, it is the humanisation of the animals and the dehumanisation of humans. I can't help but to feel profoundly annoyed and even horrified when I hear people proudly proclaiming how people that people who hunt rhinos ought to be shot on sight, waged war on, why even tortured and summarily executed. Meanwhile people starve in miserable conditions, conditions which in many cases serve to push them into risky jobs such as this. They don't really care that that person is desperate with little other way to feed his family, and that poaching groups pay him 2 years wages to kill an animal and bring the ivory to them, they are happy to decree capital punishment for that from their comfy chairs. But boy they do care about some misplaced sense of "wildlife protection" with regards to appealing species like pandas or African megafauna.
Poachers are mostly criminal gangs, not mothers feeding dying babies.
This shows a profound lack of awareness of the area. It's not some massive group of half starving people.
Also when you are dealing with the extinction of a species, drastic measures are necessary. Are you saying you prefer the economic well being of every single person on Earth over the right of a species to exist?
newsflash- poaching is lucrative enough for people to not listen when you tell them to please stop killing the animals(they'll even shoot at you if you irritate them enough). it is essentially a war between economically and ethically motivated people.
buzzfeed: [surprised pikachu face] for clicks as usual
It's a war between economically and economically motivated people.
The majority of critically endangered species are amphibians. Around 30% of all amphibians are classified as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable by the IUCN. Why have you never heard this fact before? Because practically no-one actually gives a shit about conservation.
The major conservation charities are a boondoggle. Their work often has little or no basis in science, their priorities are completely disconnected with protecting biodiversity, they often work to "save" species that are under no real threat and their efforts to protect charismatic megafauna are often detrimental to broader conservation issues.
As highlighted by this article, the impact of their activities on native peoples ranges from "highly disruptive" to "grievous and persistent abuses of human rights". In many places, the activities of conservation charities resembles the British Raj; vast numbers of people are uprooted from their homes and displaced to make room for wildlife reserves, despite those people often playing a vital role in protecting the ecosystem they inhabit.
Amphibians I think are also more passively killed as well from development or water pollution instead of with guns for profit. Now dead is dead and they are less charismatic but the lack of open maliciousness is also a factor. It took heavy campaigning to get DDT banned after it was leading to thinning eggshell deaths of bald eagles - if the cause was men with guns the lucky outcome would be the practice banned very quickly as opposed to lynching.
I doubt people would be pleased if it the main cause of amphibian decline was gunmen instead of development and water pollution. One is an emergent side effect while the other is direct malicious action.
The public does love its megafauna. I desperately want my son to be able to take his son to see cheetahs on a safari. As for frogs... I can’t make myself care even 1% as much.
My initial reaction was that, while I don't support torture in any circumstances, some kind of paramilitary force is probably the only way to keep the threatened species from going extinct.
But there are not only the two groups of people you mentioned. There are three: environmentalists, locals, and professional poachers. The smart approach would be to get the locals on the side of the environmentalists, but instead the opposite is happening:
> With deep knowledge of the land and its animals, these communities should be ideal partners in WWF’s war against poaching, anthropologists and activists said. Alienating locals only encourages them to assist professional out-of-town poachers, making that battle harder. “The Baka are the eyes and ears of the forest and could really help conservation,” said Charles Jones Nsonkali, a Cameroonian indigenous rights activist. “But they are treated as the enemy instead.”
High caliber long arms have better optics (no pun intended) and imply a "meant for rogue or rabid game but if poachers won't come quietly it works on them too". AK-47s are the cheap option however and also less discriminate in fire.
> it is essentially a war between economically and ethically motivated people.
You're leaving out the part where innocent people are being directly targeted. That's not just collateral damage. That's a supposedly charitable organization providing funds and legal/PR support to groups with a known penchant for ethnic violence.
> it is essentially a war between economically and ethically motivated people.
The people who are, at a minimum, deliberately lying to make the alleged victims of torture that they have funded less sympathetic and discredit the accusations are, if ethically motivated at all, motivated by only the most sick and twisted ethics.
So, serious question: is the libertarian position that trade in endangered-animal products should be unregulated, or that anti-poaching efforts should be so? Or, perhaps, both? To me that seems awfully close to "might makes right" but I'm still curious to hear the rationale.
I'm not a libertarian, but some have suggested large scale farming of endangered animals to meet demand for these products and put poachers out of business.
Honestly, I'm uncomfortable with the notion of a tiger farm or a rhino farm, but it's hard for me to say exactly why.
Capitalism, various forms of fascism, and chattel slavery systems each are or include some variety of this, but more directed at the cheap labor issue than the genocide issue.
There are plenty of libertarians who value the well-being of animals. Those and most libertarians would be in favor of boycotting those who abuse animals.
But what libertarianism isn't about is using physical force (which includes the state) as primary means to solve every problem in the world.
