Ivory investigator killed in Kenya | Hacker News Reader

Ivory investigator killed in Kenya

bbc.com

82 pointsadamnemecek37 comments

You guys should consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights these poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[2], is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train the park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed. There is also the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[3][4] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans (most of them are orphans due to poaching). For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular animal and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor this little fella [5][6].

[0] http://www.iapf.org/en/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander

[3] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust

[5] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp...

[6] http://instagram.com/p/sigT3IAUKb

How do you fight these poachers? Isn't it better instead to work to eliminate the conditions that push these people into this dangerous and illegal activity to survive?

You fight them with force. Countries with strict anti-poaching enforcement have a poaching rate close to 0.

this only works if you create conditions that are more lucrative than poaching, even if you factor in repercussions. it may just not be feasible

Its difficult to eliminate a condition like median annual income being between $3000-4000 - Rhino horn goes for $100,000/kg to the end user, so even assuming 20% for the poachers that several yearly wages split up among a few poachers.

Guardian has been tracking the death of environment defenders for some time now. Last year 197 people were killed.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/series/the-defenders

I've been thinking about this lately as I've seen a few stories about poaching recently. Last week it was about turtles in Mozambique (exotic pets in Thailand). Last year it was small dolphins in the Sea of Cortez (a casualty of the market for fish bladders as an aphrodisiac in China). There are also pangolins in Indonesia (Asian delicacy).

Try as we might to stop the poaching I really feel like the only way to solve this problem is by killing the demand. Honestly I don't know how to do this. It just seems like efforts to quell the supply side will be ultimately futile for animals that by definition wander in uninhabited areas and are open to poaching.

What's sad about this is how much of it is completely pointless (Chinese "medicine") and how when certain species get endangered, it just drives up the value and makes them even more of a status symbol.

Sometimes it feels like we're heading towards (or are already in) a mass extinction event where we'll be the likely biggest victims.

I was thinking about this recently as well. It almost seems better to just own the rhinos (or whichever animal) because then at least they have the incentive to keep them alive and keep them from being extinct.

On the medicinal front: maybe we can accept these idiocies as scientific truths and produce artificial alternatives (placebos to things that don't really work) that are cheaper?

Flood the market with powdered keratin, sold as 100% certified african rhino horn, for couple dollars a kg. At least theoretically, you will eliminate all poaching overnight.

One group darts rhinos and injects the horn with a dye, rendering the horn worthless for poaching.

The U.S. TV series "Gorongosa Park: a Rebirth"[0] shows park stewards trying to rebuild tourism, with one goal being better employment options (as guides, rangers, etc.) than poaching.

Some of their elephants don't develop tusks at all, an apparent mutation that increases survival odds.

[0] http://www.pbs.org/gorongosa/home/

- capitalism, inequality and desperation... A toxic combination.

Wouldn’t the last be toxic regardless of the economic system in play?

Even in the "absence" of an economic system, i.e. lawless decentralized areas, it would still be a problem.

This is less about capitalism more about status-seeking.

I think he was referring to the poor economic conditions of the poachers, and how they are pushed to this line of work. Not dissimilar to drug dealers in inner city USA.

That’s surely covered under “inequality” and “desperation” though?

This is definitely true, though many of the big-time poachers are foreigners. A key mechanism that's been shown to reduce poaching is to let the local people derive an economic gain from the animals without killing or maiming them. Like safaris or photo shoots, etc.

Have communist societies that had inequality and desperation resisted the temptation of poaching?

I hope it's not off topic: anybody who wants find out more about ivory trade in an easy way, there is a movie documentary: The Ivory Game (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5952266

Tragic death, but sounds potentially unrelated to his ivory work.

Aren't there startups working on producing fake ivory? Especially with animal products (meat, skins, bone, etc.) flooding the market with ethically man-made products seems far healthier to people and animals in the long run.

Fake ivory wont help as there will be a premium for the real stuff. What you really need to do is make ivory seem very uncool.

Or you can flood the market with high-quality fake stuff, to the point where people stop caring about the real thing. See also: diamonds.

My impressions is that most people still care about real diamonds though. Have thongs changed? Have prices changed?

Indeed. Also lab grown diamonds aren't much cheaper than real ones AFAIK.

I might be biased by my own personal preferences, then. I certainly have no interest in a real diamond, when synthetics are so good.

Good data exists to test your assumption, which I think is partially correct.

http://www.idexonline.com/diamond_prices_index

The Diamond price index shows prices HAVE come down in the past 5 years by approximately 10%. Fake diamonds may be depressing the price of real ones, but it doesn't look like the market is flooded enough to solve problems like Conflict Diamonds right now.

This is probably mostly because the price of lab grown synthetic diamonds is still in the same range as real diamonds for most large stones and engagement rings. As the price of artificial diamonds continues to decline this effect should continue to grow.

Is a synthetic diamond chemically equivalent to a real one? Great that price is dropping.

We already have high quality fake stuff: plastics.

Ivory does not have any practical uses as a material that you could not copy with some kind of bulk produced material.

That's why piano keys were ivory until good enough plastics came along in the 1980's.

The only reason the trade is strong is because of tradition, not because we don't have alternatives.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/what-is...

The aim is not to make fakes so good buyers choose them.

The aim is to make fakes so good sellers can't prove their product is authentic - and therefore, authentic items can't command a price premium. This triggers adverse selection [1] and removes the market for authentic ivory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_for_lemons

10 seconds with a microscope (and not even a very good one) would identify the real thing. Ivory as an organic material is a lot harder to fake than a diamond, which is better when it has less irregularities (ok, up to a point where flaws are used to prove a diamond is the real thing and not a synthetic).

Have a look at some ivory micrographs to see how intricate its structure is.

Instead of creating fake ivory, you could instead refashion other 'humane' ivory and pass it as rhino horn or whatever.

Real, humane ivory is easier to come by than people think - for example, there are huge caches of walrus bones from inuit hunters over thousands of years which are just filled with ivory.

That's an interesting idea. And much more likely to succeed than to fake ivory.

scarce resources are difficult to make uncool.

I'm not sure. With rare things, you only need a few people willing to pay ridiculous prices for the behavior to continue. And the more rare it becomes, the more coveted as well by people who can look beyond the moral implications of killing elephants.

But, if kids in China start wearing fake ivory necklaces to school and can buy them for a few bucks, why would you pay thousands more for something that is virtually indistinguishable? The trick is to make it so close to actually ivory (or genetically grown to be identical). If it looks like a bad knock off it won't work.

It's not as clear cut. Luxury items have strange economic behavior but let's say that the a govt banned sales of Ferraris overnight. Would rich people go to great lengths to buy Ferraris or would they buy Lamborghinis?

Imitation diamonds get better and better... but has that really harmed worldwide demand for the real thing?

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