The elephant that flew | Hacker News Reader

The elephant that flew

bbc.com

38 pointssuprgeek12 comments

An elephant is poached (on average) every 15 minutes in Africa.

The poachers are often not of the local area, and roam between parks based on how easy the target seems. After a kill, they usually get out quickly and pass the ivory to a smuggler bound for China. China's demand for traditional medicine and ivory drives almost all of this poaching.

The poachers don't end up making a ton of money (though it's still very high by African standards), but the smugglers and other folks net millions of dollars.

I went and spoke with some folks in Tanzania about aerial/drone enforcement last year. Corruption is endemic in most of the countries, and so often these poachers have agreements with one (or many) of the local park rangers. Also, many of the elephants are killed outside of the park boundaries, since they are used to walking hundreds of miles between different parks (only recently, elephant generation-wise, has human habitation started to prevent that).

An ideal solution would be to kill demand, though that will probably never happen. Vilifying traditional medicine and ivory in China is just not feasible in the time remaining.

Technological solutions (drones, tracking, etc) would have to be enforced at a country level to avoid local corruption issues. It will probably not help with elephants outside of reserves, though they are getting killed off fast enough that the elephants are learning to stay put (which is kind of sad, changing thousands of years of migratory patterns). Often these kills are in densely wooded areas, but other than that drone enforcement should help, in theory.

Today, there is some aerial surveillance, but it is not sufficient for spotting poachers at night. There are also plenty of other people who transit through parks (people fishing the streams, etc), and it is hard to differentiate. Multi-spectral (at least IR) and computer vision will probably be needed to pick out a truck amidst thousands of square miles of area.

Rambling post, apologies.

http://www.wildaid.org/news/yao-ming-says-no-ivory-and-rhino...

Look at what some people are doing with their time/lives while others are trying to make the next dating app.

Yup. Time to have a think.

Bitter ending in that it was the lack of education on local wildlife that lead to this baby elephants death in the end.

Surely a country capable of a one child policy must be capable of a no ivory policy?

The ivory consumers are members of the dictatorship and their friends.

Sad ending. However its heartening that someone tried to save the baby elephant. The world needs to do so much more to protect wildlife. It seems things have gotten so much worse over the last decade or two.

Can drone practice take place on poachers?

Won't it be better to educate people and crackdown on buyers of animal products. Although poachers are doing the dirty work; they are not entirely at fault here. Drones and use of technology can make their work tough; but it won't deter them.

We've been educating and cracking down for decades. I'm not suggesting an alternative, rather an additional tool. I think a bomb might be quite educational. I would be happy with peaceful monitor drones, thermal imaging cctv, a DARPA challenge for autonomous vehicles to fly over reserves and locate poachers, maybe tag them, or dart them, then alert authorities, but that has far less chance of happening than military training exercises with an added benefit.

Edit: I have more to say.

AI monitoring is needed because the areas are too large for people to watch. Is a geostationary satellite able to scan a large reserve for people, or are numerous cameras closer to ground level needed? Securing the reserve boundaries - how far away are we from forcefields? Towers with some sort of array of detectors monitoring the boundaries, broken beams? Radar? Lidar? Seismometers? Pressure sensors? Money often talks louder than education, as does short-term mindedness over long-term. Education hasn't stopped murder, burglary, mugging, rape, ... if it does stop poaching, it won't be any time soon. This sounds like the opportunity for challenges which techies like to solve. My knowledge of technology is unfortunately too broad and superficial, as you've probably gathered, but someone's surely got to be tempted.

There are a number of factors at play.

One is the demand for ivory and other products derived from endangered animals, much of it driven by new wealth in China (but also elsewhere).

Another is the lack of economic opportunity throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. As I recently realized doing the maths, Kenya's electrical generation amounts to about 37 watts per person. That's enough to run a typical laptop, maybe. With projected wind potential of up to 1 GW, wind could supply over 2/3 of total present generating capacity in the country. A gigawatt is about the size of a large coal or nuclear plant. More: http://redd.it/2dm7b0

And there's corruption and the lack of resources in policing wildlife refuges and reserves. I'm watching the opening episode of Years of Living Dangerously, one storyline follows a similar history evolving in Indonesia with palm-oil plantations taking over virgin equatorial rainforest with nominally protected status. Over 80% of the "protected" forest is described as destroyed or degraded by slash-and-burn, conversion to farmland, logging, or other activities (17,000 hectare remain of 85,000 hectare total).

The pressures of people, industrialization, economic growth, and other factors on the planet are unsustainable and have been recognized by many in the ecological and other communities for decades. General awareness is only slowly starting to leak out.

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