Hacker News Reader

Comment by porpoise | Hacker News Reader

China banned all ivory trade at the end of 2017 and by all accounts (see WWF and NG sources cited in the tweet) it's been working quite well.

https://www.twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/13397828106309...

View on HN

Yet the paper you reply to is written in sep 2019 and states that the Chinese market is still a massive influence. Don't you think that outweighs your tweet from 2018 from some guy?

The reports I linked to argue that (i) demand has been significantly reduced. The paper I replied to argues that (ii) a reduction of demand is significantly correlated with a reduction of poaching. Not only is there no "outweighing" of the former by the latter, but the former depends for its point on the latter (i.e. there is no reason to care if (i) is true unless (ii) is true).

The tweet is from this month. The NG article is from 2018, but the WWF article postdates the Nature article.

I read the linked tweets, and found them pretty vague.

Ivory powder is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), so it's more likely than not that China won't stop killing elephants (or rhinos.) Additionally, exotic TCM ingredients are considered to be a status symbol, so price is no object.

In addition, there's a new development. The CCP is intruding into Asian and African countries using Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a pretext, and even positioning armies there. This could well accelerate poaching.

I think you mean well, but consider the source of your information before being argumentative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com