Worth mentioning: when Xi visited Tanzania not too long ago his entourage smuggled a bunch of ivory out. So yeah I'm sure the orders to stop ivory trading from the guys whose houses are full of illegal ivory will be taken seriously.
Also worth mentioning is that China is now the new market for seal pelts and seal meat. In 2010 they decided to start that trade with Canada, a move that contrasts with the most of the rest of the world where bans have been put in place.
I suppose a case can be made for battering two week old seals to death with a sharp blow to the head, not forgetting to slit the arteries in their flippers before skinning them as we wouldn't want to be over-run with seals, would we? However, I am amazed that a new market can be found for seal products in China. I can't imagine 'braised baby seal on toast' would sell that well if sold in Europe. I don't know if you would get that many 'likes' after 'Instagramming' such a dish, which seems to be the reason for eating deluxe food these days.
>The term cobra effect stems from an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi. The government therefore offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse.
Elephants take a long time to mature, so this would be a really really long-term plan, even ignoring the other problems such as where to find the space to keep them, and what to do with the rest of the animal besides the tusks...
Pachers kill elephants that had their tusks cut off already, to extract the tiny last bit of ivory remaining in their skulls. That's why strategies of cutting tusks off regular elephants and destroying them were unsuccessful - if anything, they made poachers more aggressive, since now they had to kill more elephants to get any amount of ivory at all.
The idea is that if elephants are owned. The owner would protect their investment in order to profit from the elephant in the furture when the tusks grow back.
That's like an extreme simplification of the situation.
a.) Less profitable does not mean non-profitable. Currently, the poachers are being paid couple hundreds of dollars for a pair of tusks which are worth like $350K on the black market. There is no way that legalization would drive price low enough for poaching to be non-profitable.
b.) Price of ivory for poachers is $0. Price of ivory for ranchers is $0+. How do you solve this?
> If the price got lower there would probably be less poaching.
You are making a ton of assumptions about the behavior of the market that I'm assuming you have nothing to back up with. But provide some links if you have anything, I'm all ears.
> Combine that with funded-via-non-poaching campaigns against poachers.
And organizations like http://vetpaw.org/
Yes, what about them? They are increasing the price?
My other thought-experiment solution would be mixing in lethal substitutes for ivory/rhino horn/etc. early in the supply chain, with the goal being deleterious effects on end users, reducing demand. Although it would be more ideal if it actually killed people involved in the supply line, but there are too many unwitting couriers (common carriers, etc) to make that reasonable.
A more palatable version of this would be a campaign about pre-existing health consequences of using this stuff in TCM, followed by flooding the market with synthetics claimed to be safer/more efficacious.
Killing people to save animals is a bit perverse. Some problems aren't so severe that they should be solved at such extreme costs. The same was done during prohibition - and people kept drinking the methanol-spiked alcohol and kept dying. It wasn't enough of a deterrent.
Not even close, demand dropped by 29% (source below). And the cause of the drop was the demand itself declining rather than anything China did. Their enforcement was minimal, the soup itself was just becoming less popular. It was sort of like a fad. Kind of like the sushi fad in the late 90s in California. If it was due to China's actions, you wouldn't have these sorts of stories still: "Why Shark Finning Bans Aren't Keeping Sharks Off The Plate (Yet)" (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/03/390449252/why...)
Did you read your link? The numbers "were self-reported by
shark fin vendors in the Guangzhou". Hardly scientific and it's only from a single city in China.
I'd trust NPR over that source. NPR claims that while shark fin soup sales dropped slightly, harvest & hunting of sharks is still going strong.
Though, the real point here is that China isn't and won't do much about it. Oh, they'll put laws on the books and make a big show of it as they do with everything, but it's just talk for the most part. Enforcement of those laws is another matter entirely. For example, their pollution and environmental regulations rival that of the U.S. So why doesn't China mirror the U.S when it comes to its environment? Because they don't enforce those laws. And when they do, a small bribe to the inspection team is usually all it takes to get them to turn around and take the day off.
> Did you read your link? The numbers "were self-reported by shark fin vendors in the Guangzhou". Hardly scientific and it's only from a single city in China.
Did you read yours? I prefer a source that clearly states where the data comes from. I don't have access to the paper the NPR article references and I imagine that you don't either so we don't really know where the 29% number comes from even.
Are you arguing against the bans or are you saying that they won't work. If the first, your arguments are kind of unrelated. If the second, sure, they might not work. It's worth giving it a shot.
Great job guys, east and west meet to talk about an African issue without involving Africa at all.
The US is all happy to try and push for their own beef exports from cattle raised in relatively poor conditions, but when you have a commercial animal product that is from Africa and could provide a much needed export, everyone suddenly discovers their morals.
> east and west meet to talk about an African issue without involving Africa at all.
Well at the current rate of poaching, elephants would be extinct in the next 10-20 years. And considering the corruption levels in many of these countries, yes, it's the consumer markets that have to solve this.
> when you have a commercial animal product that is from Africa and could provide a much needed export,
It's not a 'commercial' product when the ivory comes from illegal sources. Would you be for legalization of cocaine to help the South American economy?
> would provide a much needed export,
On the large scale of things, it would hardly make a difference for the living standards.
> Well at the current rate of poaching, elephants would be extinct in the next 10-20 years. And considering the corruption levels in many of these countries, yes, it's consumer markets that have to get involved.
Or you could let African countries farm them and have loads of them, just like you have loads of pigs and sheep and cattle and all the other commercially farmed animals which somehow are ethically different.
Instead you create a "War on Drugs" situation, which not only is hugely ineffective at solving the problem, it empowers the criminal organisations within the country that grows the product. Replace Mexican cartels with African poachers. Now not only are we unable to make money from the animals, we're losing money having to pay for rangers, and at the end of it lose the animals themselves to the inexorable attrition from the poachers (as in the White Rhino).
Then everyone in the West has a fat tut-tut about what a shame it is for the animal to go extinct, while refusing to accept farming as a less ethically palatable but more effective means of preventing extinction, and we just move onto the next animal.
> It's not a 'commercial' product when the ivory comes from illegal sources.
It is a commercial product because there's a market for it and people are buying it. It may be illegal, but it's still being bought and sold. Not only that but in the past we (South Africa) have been able to release limited amounts of stockpiled ivory to be available for sale, but these kinds of agreements work to make that impossible.
> On the large scale of things, it would hardly make a difference for the living standards.
Africa needs every bit it can get to help development and be able to become an economic power with its own valuable and unique exports. Even if it just helps a few thousand people and their families be independent and contributing to Africa's growth, that matters, and dismissing it comes from a position of real privilege.
> Or you could let African countries farm them and have loads of them, just like you have loads of pigs and sheep and cattle and all the other commercially farmed animals which somehow are ethically different.
Do you know much about elephant husbandry? If you do, can you please talk about some of the possible issues with your proposal and how you would solve them?
Also, do you really believe that it's the legality of ivory sales that's stopping the people who would become elephant farmers from being farmers?
> Instead you create a "War on Drugs" situation, which not only is hugely ineffective at solving the problem, it empowers the criminal organisations within the country that grows the product.
No, no it's not. If someone wants to buy heroin, the only thing that will scratch that itch is heroin. That is not the same with ivory as the potential customers can buy something else. The situation is similar to the U.S. ban on sales of Kinder Surprise eggs. What do you think is the size of the black market for Kinder Surprise eggs?
> Not only that but in the past we (South Africa) have been able to release limited amounts of stockpiled ivory to be available for sale,
You realize that these are just increasing the demand right? The current poaching crisis is generally attributed to the 2008 CITES reclassification of ivory which let some African countries sell their stockpiles to China and Japan. This increased the demand and poaching has skyrocketed as a result.
> Africa needs every bit it can get to help development and be able to become an economic power with its own valuable and unique exports.
Again, do you really think that there are that many people who would pick up elephant farming if it became possible to sell ivory?
> Even if it just helps a few thousand people and their families be independent and contributing to Africa's growth, that matters, and dismissing it comes from a position of real privilege.
Can you also talk about how this proposal would prevent poaching of elephants in the wild?
> Also, do you really believe that it's the legality of ivory sales that's stopping the people who would become elephant farmers from being farmers?
Yes. This isn't like growing marijuana where your investment is relatively small, and you can just quickly grow it hydroponically in your shed under lights.
No one is going to grow and hide an elephant in their shed. It takes years and investment and if you know you can't sell it at the end of that no one will try.
> If someone wants to buy heroin, the only thing that will scratch that itch is heroin. That is not the same with ivory as the potential customers can buy something else.
But they don't. They want ivory and they're prepared to pay for ivory. And they'll pay $1500+ for their little ivory figurines. Are they paying that for a hit of heroin? Because if you can't even stop the financial might of street bums from buying drugs, how are you planning to stop the relatively rich Chinese buyers of ivory?
> No one is going to grow and hide an elephant in their shed. It takes years and investment and if you know you can't sell it at the end of that no one will try.
So what you are saying is that this money would not really be going to help that many people, mostly only the people who currently already own large swaths of land, is that correct?
> But they don't.
They would if ivory was harder to obtain. Again, you don't see a black market for Kinder Surprise eggs.
> They want ivory and they're prepared to pay for ivory.
No, they want an antique or an art object. Or to show their wealth. There are many other ways of achieving that. If Ferraris became illegal, people would buy Lamborghinis.
Actually, tusks are continually growing, like our hair and nails. I've read proposals to farm a "sustainable" amount of tusk (Google says they grow 15 cm per year). The Chinese market isn't looking for huge tusks for display but rather a powder to put in traditional remedies.
No mention of getting ivory from Siberian bogs from Mammoths a grey area since it's not from a living animal but it's a terrible loss in an archaeological sense.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c0dca42fbd17481989ad8946fe9e0...