-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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I would suggest putting the chimpanzee that is called Bush (am I really the only one who thinks he looks and acts like one?) in a zoo. Period.
Seriously though I agree with the majority here in thinking that this proposed shift in policy is potentially very dangerous.
Protect the animals in their natural environtments I say. And ban hunting for pleasure. Penalty? Death! Why send someone to the electric chair for murdering a person but not for killing some protected animal? Where's the difference? In case you had forgotten, humans are animals too! Always have been, always will be. No so-called "sophistication" will be able to change that fact.
-------------------- Lister: Don't give me the "Star Trek" crap! It's too early in the morning. - Red Dwarf "The Last Day"
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
AP, you are right, we shouldn't place one 'protected' animal's life over and above another in that manner....
Jason, I re-read my post and caught the meaning of yours, damn I am slow.... But I guess I will remember to check my spelling a bit better now...
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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In Philip Caputo's ( National Geographicjournalist)book Ghosts of Tsavo, he relays how, when the big-game hunting was outlawed in Kenya in 1977, the market for ivory taken from the tusks of elephants grew exponentially.
As a result, elephant poaching by Somali gangs on the border with Kenya, for whom a single tusk could far surpass several years worth of living expenses (Caputo says that the ivory from two elephants could yield a profit of $1 million US dollars) nearly depleted the species in the 1980s.
Big-game hunters had a fairly marginal effect on the species, as they sampled relatively few animals, much like the policy that the Administration is supporting, and the dividends brought by their patronage served as an incentive to protect the wildlife and helped the Kenyan economy.
Conversely, efforts by Richard Leakey, who headed Kenya's Wildlife Department and even formed a group of heavily armed "rangers" with armed helicopters to curb poaching, fell dramatically short until the international ivory trade was banned in 1989 when the species was threatened with extinction.
While this approach may seem to be somewhat cold and on the surface seems to fly in the face of common sense, in fact the approach has documented success and is not nearly as "stupid" or "ill-thought" as one might imagine.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Appearantly the 'rangers' didn't do enough, I would have to see if they were being bribed to hush up, helping for a fee, incompetent, or anything else that would inhibhit their doing the job properly.
Or are these people above corruption????
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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In the first part of this, I don�t necessarily see a one-to-one relationship between the big game hunters and the increased traffic in elephant ivory.
Sure it�s all well and good that these fine fellows spent some money for the pleasure of shooting wild animals, but I can�t really see how that alone could sustain a regional economy, which is what you�re talking about.
Mix into the equation the social unrest, civil wars, and famine, and there are certainly other economic factors at play here. Clearly the poachers saw the economic incentive in taking elephant tusks, but you could just as easily put some of that on the outlawing of the trade which drove the prices that a poacher might receive up.
So, yeah, you take the trophy hunter money out of the picture and the locals are going to look for a way to make it up, but I question how much real impact they might have had. And I wonder what roll regional social-economic instability had in this. I have to imagine that at some point that more and more displaced peoples regionally were pushed into an area where the reward of poaching was greater than the risk
As for the Richard Leakey paragraph, I�m not at all sure what the point is. What you may not notice is that it certainly bolsters the argument against re-opening ivory and skins trade. If heavily armed �rangers� couldn�t stop the poaching but the elimination of the end market did, well, why should we, as Mr. Bush�s administration seems to argue, re-open the end-market?
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
It seems to me that only real good was done for the Elephants when the international ban was enacted and if the ban had been erected BEFORE the elephant's numbers reached critical levels, there would never have been such a crisis in the first place.
Why not just enact a severe ban on ALL endangered species poaching and products?
Because then, asian men wouldnt have whatever aincent potion they think will make their dicks bigger. Ever see what these fuckers do for their sharkfin soup?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Jason, that would then take away those nice trophies that one has to have on the wall, for one to be someone you do know.
I really do hope the sarcasm is there, it is sooo hard to get it in with just typing....
I guess if read as if being said by an uppity person should do the trick....
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
Yeah, it's there.
And if this Administration were really so interested in generating profits to help poor countries with wildlife conservation, it would, oh, cancel its agricultural subsidies so products from said countries could actually compete on the market. Free trade... but only in trophies.
-------------------- ".mirrorS arE morE fuN thaN televisioN" - TEH PNIK FLAMIGNO
Registered: Nov 1999
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![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
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