Botswana threatens to deport 20k elephants to Germany
politico.eu
politico.eu
Especially once you consider how destructive a single dog can be in your example. And once your 100 acre utopia parcels out the land for a fraction of the animals that need sanctuary to live out their days, what do you do with the rest of the animals?
Frankly, PETA shelters are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to optics. It's easy to criticize them without offering a better solution to the ugly reality of mass scale animal dumping beyond naive suggestions like "how about all shelters just become no-kill shelters." I think we should reserve more of our anger for people who breed animals into existence, not the people trying to handle the glib externalities.
I'm glad they are sticking to their principles and doing the right thing. Listing to popular opinion never works since people will always hunt for reasons to criticize. If popular opinion had its way with the animal rights movement, there would be no animal rights movement.
It's hard to say how much an "average dog" would cost to feed because there is so much variety, but ~$25/month seems like a minimal baseline. So that's $300/year in food alone, for a small dog with cheap food. Larger dogs can easily be $600/year.
And that's just food, not counting vet costs, housing, cost of things like toys and whatnot, staff costs (this sort of thing can't really run on 100% volunteer work), etc. etc.
"PETA has a lot of money, they can just set up a sanctuary" is one of those arguments from ignorance that only makes sense if you spent less than 10 seconds looking at it.
I recal last week on HN everybody were sure this was a stupid question with no connection to anything remotely practical...
Botswana should have threatened to do that, because it's ultimately a ridiculous threat, but to be fair, i would rather have rich people go kill designated animals and pay through the nose for it to curb population, rather than letting poachers and illegal safaris do the same. At least it move money from people who do not need it, to people who do.
This might be hypocritical and lame, but I think it's the prevailing feeling among the voting population. Maybe the German government could balance it's trophy ban with some in-place elephant sponsorship.
Also I can't imagine why you'd expect to get an interesting comment from PETA.
Would you prefer that I don't care whether someone shoots you?
Well, while i don't agree with the original comment, both of you are missing the critical part of this in your argumentation.
It's missing the part where the potentially killed subject is actively harmful to others/humans in its habitat. That makes all the difference.
While I appreciate your point here, I don't consider it to be decisive. I think that if the elephants were considerate of their neighbors they would still be a burden on the Batswana. Ultimately there will be competition for land and water and the opportunity cost of not letting rich foreigners shoot them.
Botswana is a good place for the elephants, and the government seems relatively well disposed towards them. Ideally that would be enough, but I think economically it has to be worth their while, otherwise the resources will be put to a more "productive" use.
Also I guess humans were hunting elephants for thousands of years keeping the population “in check”
* https://www.botswana.co.za/Botswana_Wildlife_Behaviour-trave....
Did they though? I don't think elephant meat is eaten and ivory isn't really a super useful substance to African tribes afaik, it's more desired in the west.
While I understand the need for wildlife conservation, all of this sits quite uneasy with me. What kind of person thinks it's just amazing to shoot such an intelligent being as an elephant?
Then again, is it really worth making a huge fuss about a relatively small amount of animals who get to live most of their lives in freedom, when there are billions of animals every year being raised in far worse circumstances? It seems to me that's a far more pressing matter.
Also, according to [1], "elephants roaming the country have killed 36 people over the past two years", which complicate things even further. Elephants are beautiful animals, but they're also wild animals. And quite large ones at that. You'd probably lose a fight with an elephant – badly.
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/five-things-know-a...
"Too much wolves, people is not safe!" so they treat with violence unless are allowed to kill them. A year later "wildboars invasion! toddlers in danger" so they require to be hunted (by them). Then is a chain of "too much foxes", that lead to "rabbits destroyed our food", and then is "mice alert!", and then is rats, and then "this asphalt has a plague of fire ants, why we need to suffer so much?"...
Is an endless dismantling spiral of bullshit, and is very profitable for a few.
Botswana has "too much investors" ravaging nature, and elephants have ivory that other countries still crave.
I can predict your dismay when eventually realize that dogs kill much more people than wolves.
You will not truly understand the pressures on both wildlife and people unless you live in a populous location . The people living close to wildlife are already marginalized and disenfranchised and when conservation does not account for their livelihoods it does not work.
There is not much ivory or trade in India, elephants are revered in religion and strongly protected by the government federally and locally, the friction still exists between farmers and wild life.
To quote the Botswana minister it is easy to sit in [city] and comment on the nature of their conservation, go there and live their lives and then make sweeping statements.
The quote from the Botswanian president is very applicable to your comment: “It is very easy to sit in Berlin and have an opinion about our affairs in Botswana. We are paying the price for preserving these animals for the world.”
I'd like to see that!
The embedded threat is reducing anti-poaching enforcement and penalties, or exploring re-legalising the ivory trade with China.
Botswana is flipping out over Germany threatening their trophy hunting business. Presumably if they go full poaching/ivory, they write off that business for good. They’re trying to defend the status quo.
And almost every country does wildlife management by killing some animals. I feel their point of "okay, so we can't do that according to you – then are you going to take care of the animals?" was well taken.
But it does seem kind of ugly of us as a species to preserve them as a species for hunting.