A major controversy is brewing in Kenya right now about whether to remove the ban on wildlife hunting in order to raise money for conservation. Poaching has been devastating Kenyan wildlife; the logic is that since big-game hunters will pay lots of money to hunt big game, this will offer greater incentive to protect species and funnel money into underfunded conservation efforts.
Hunting is no doubt a part of conservation efforts in many countries, but it is unsurprisingly met with resistance from some environmentalists who feel that there is somewhat of a contradiction in killing some of the animals that one is trying to protect. Also, many question whether it actually does lead to better overall conservation.
At the end of the day, the answer comes down to economics. The positive incentives for conservation can also come from people who want to shoot photos, not bullets. The question is, why isn't this working in Kenya? In many places throughout the world, the fact that rich tourists want to come see wildlife and pay good money to do so provides sufficient incentive for protection.
One reason that viewing often doesn't generate the revenue hunting does is that park fees are often low, much lower than tourists would be willing to pay given that airfare, hotels, and tours are in the many thousands of dollars already. This may be something for the Kenyans to consider looking into.
Also, the question must be asked, if poaching is already decimating wildlife, what is there to stop additional illegal hunting if the ban is removed? Without enforcement of existing laws, there is not much reason to think new laws will dramatically change the situation.
This Halloween, cut flesh for the climate
WWF finds tons of new species about to be wiped out by climate change [slideshow]
Comments
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GreenEngineer Posted 5:03 am
19 Apr 2007
The practical resistance is quite a reasonable concern, and I agree, it comes down to economics. Will the additional money raised be enough to:
Raise the standard of living of locals enough that they can stop hunting the wildlife for food.
Have enough left over to hire additional rangers, to shoot the @!&!$ sport poachers.
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Pandu Posted 6:05 am
19 Apr 2007
I don't personally like the way hunters take credit for supporting wildlife when they are actually interested in killing wildlife. It is ethically perverted, but what can be done? Open season on poachers, with the hunted poacher's wealth going to a conservation fund. Just trying to come up with ideas here... Whoa, I just read the previous comment. Maybe this idea is more popular than I thought.
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amc89 Posted 6:55 am
19 Apr 2007
I highly doubt that allowing legal hunting will reduce poaching. I think this is just a case of the wealthy trophy hunting industry trying to greenwash their activity. I think solutions include more dollars to enforcement and higher prices for non-consumptive tourists and more of an effort to get them to come.
When it comes to big predators like bears and lions, species that breed very slowly and are highly sensitive to environmental change, I just don't think they can afford to have members of the healthy adult population be killed by trophy hunters. Especially when there's no guarantee that legal trophy hunting will actually reduce poaching.
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millwright Posted 7:37 am
19 Apr 2007
Nice thing about hunting safaris is they're a win/win/win. The client gets the experience and trophy, locals and hunter get hire fees and meat, Game turns from a nuisance and hazard to an asset worth far more than a quick meal and a few bucks for parts. People protect assets.
Another issue is as human populations grow they, and their needs impinge upon game species. herbivores soon learn planted crops are far more tasty and nutritious than natural browse. They compete with domestic cattle for grass. Predators and scavengers follow the food. >MW
millwright
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Delay And Deny Posted 7:43 am
19 Apr 2007
a) Catalog a genome
b) Clone it
The new moral issue is not whether we should preserve existing species, but whether we should reanimate all extinct species ever created.
I mean, that's he logical outcome of ecologists thinking, right?
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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millwright Posted 9:43 am
19 Apr 2007
I would completely discount native populations' traditional sustenance hunting of these anomals until I find evidence their improved technology and access has changed their hunting habits/take in the population. >MW
millwright
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davidintokyo Posted 10:25 am
19 Apr 2007
Kenya must however, avoid trying to impose it's views on other peoples. Unfortunately, Kenya (backed by Mali) has a new proposal for CITES that would prohibit legal trade in ivory, apparently to fight illegal trade in ivory (?). This proposal fails to take their neighboring African states' interests into consideration.
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davidintokyo Posted 10:27 am
19 Apr 2007
Have the existing bans on trade stamped out illegal hunting of wildlife?
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GreenEngineer Posted 12:08 pm
19 Apr 2007
I don't think it's a good idea, either, but that's the logic behind it. It's not completely stupid.
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JMG Posted 3:35 pm
19 Apr 2007
If you raise the price of shooting photos rather than bullets, you are just encouraging more bullets and few photos.
What we can NOT afford to do is encourage people to take airplanes for holidays in Africa--climate and habitat destruction/disruption threaten thousands of species entire, rather than just individuals. People who fly in jets to view animals in the wild are helping to destroy what they claim to treasure.
What is most needed is to figure out a way to make it so that people in poor countries have an incentive to ensure survival of these species in the wild. Rather than encouraging hunting or phototourism, how about the rich countries in the north pay poor countries in the south an annual fee for services provided that is tied to the audited wild populations, with a kicker added when populations are increasing.
I can't think of a single country in the south that hasn't been put into debt bondage and forced to sell their assets out to the rich by the real axis of evil (World Bank/IMF/WTO). Read John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" for some insight into how it's done.
How about we start a gradual process of forgiving a significant percentage of all those debts in the poor countries every year so they don't HAVE to care what the ivory traders or the trophy hunters want. I'm sure that the people of Kenya do NOT want these animals to disappear either, any more than the people of New England wanted the whales to go away. (Luckily, the oceans were large and the technology was primitive then, so enough whales survived to limp into the oil age. Land animals are not so lucky.)
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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caniscandida Posted 5:32 pm
19 Apr 2007
E.g., members of armed factions in the Democratic Republic of Congo kill animals for bushmeat for reasons rather different than those of local residents who kill them to put their meat for sale in local markets. And both of these classes of poachers are very different from the separate but perhaps related East-Asia-based networks dealing in ivory, on the one hand, and in animal parts for the Chinese traditional medicines industry, on the other.
(It is interesting how these East Asians seem to have taken to heart the well-known fortune cookie oracle of John Maynard Keynes, "In the long run we are all dead." It apparently matters nothing to them that many kinds of animals will no longer be alive in a matter of decades; they want their money now.)
(GreenEngineer refers to an entirely different class, "sport poachers." But I do not know who they are supposed to be.)
For now, preliminary to this sort of international study and classification, I like very much the suggestions that JMG gave, as part of "being realistic." But I wish he/she could explain this enigmatic sentence:
<<
I'm sure that the people of Kenya do NOT want these animals to disappear either, any more than the people of New England wanted the whales to go away.
>>
Frankly, I am quite in the dark about the attitudes of either the Kenyans of today or the New Englanders of the past. And I wonder how JMG can be so "sure."
In the very first comment in this thread, GreenEngineer wrote:
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The resistance is partly practical (will it work/help?) and partly aesthetic.
>>
He is apparently talking about the resistance of certain environmentalists to the suggestion of the ban-removal. I suspect he is mostly right. But it needs to be added that there are very solid ethical reasons as well for disliking the idea of relegalized hunting. And it is not impossible that at least some environmentalists have those reasons in mind.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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JMG Posted 5:17 am
20 Apr 2007
First, because, though I'm often in error, I'm rarely in doubt.
But, second, because I look to what people do as a guide to what they think--
Kenya grappling with poaching, tourism, and ivory tells me that they want to stop the first, continue the second, and are unsure about the whether the third helps or hurts the first two. From their behaviors to date, nothing suggests that they would prefer that their charismatic megafauna disappear; in fact, that would elimanate all poaching (though probably most tourism too).
Similarly, the New Englanders spent more and more money outfitting ships to find whales on longer and longer voyages in more and more dangerous seas, to harvest a resource that was essential to their economy. From that, we can infer that they wanted whales to exist, so that they could be used.
If they didn't value whales for their utility, or if they wanted to hunt whales to extinction, they could have accomplished this far more efficiently by leaving the kills in the sea and dispensing with all the at-sea rendering and continuing on with the hunt sort of the at-sea analogue to the slaughter of the bison on the North American plains).
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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nikjsc Posted 2:03 am
02 May 2007
You describe the access of evil (WTO, WB, IMF) as placing poor countries in chains of poverty with their development policies, yet you advocate the removal of tourism from these countries because "people to take airplanes for holidays in Africa--climate and habitat destruction/disruption threaten thousands of species entire, rather than just individuals."
This is uninformed for the following reasons:
1)The second largest source of revenue for Rwanda/Uganda is tourism behind tea/coffee production. Removal of second largest source of income would plunge these countries further into poverty than any of those evil organizations could ever dream. And in terms of human development, would you prefer to work on a coffee plantation or as a nature guide? This is often the choice in these countries, and I'll say the latter is preferable, as I've experienced both.
2) Much of the conservation work in Rwanda and Uganda is funded also by tourism. If you do a little research on the International Gorilla Conservation Program (http://www.igcp.org), you'll find that most of the resources that go to directly to the protection of the extremely endangered Mountain Gorillas. What fundung would you care to replace this with?
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