Yes, deer.
My congratulations to the op. It actually takes talent to write a message who’s meaning is impenetrable while still using words that everyone knows without sounding like a raving madman. That is a remarkable skill.
Just FYI, folks
I give you The Wilds.
10,000 acres of Ohio hillsides now the habitat of various megafauna. If you’ve ever wanted to see giraffes running (apparently) wild through Ohio this is the place for you.
Typically the megafauna running free through American states are winos, not rhinos.
This question was posed by my environmental ethics professor in an assignment. I have been trying to derive his meaning, and was hoping that I could get some help.
So this is a homework assignment? O.K.
I admire your professor. He is a genius. He’s diabolical and obviously hates his students to phrase a question this way, but he is a genius for being able to pull it off.
I’d say “Yes, but merely keeping a handful of specimens alive behind fences is a grotesque debasement of the concept of ‘preservation’. We could more easily take and store genetic samples to accomplish the same end.”
Say - if everybody’s so desparate for rhino horn, why not just grow the horn in a lab and leave the freaking rhinos alone? I’m not saying I’d deploy a whole lot of scientists to work on this one, but it would be a better solution somewhat akin to the test-tube meat some groups are working on.
I think you guys are missing the (what I think is the, anyway) point - the ranches aren’t to protect a breeding population of rhinos, the ranches are kill-ranches that the rhino horn industry would operate.
The fact is, poachers aren’t going to want to go through all the effort, so they’d go steal them some taboo wild rhino horn anyway. Plus the “legal” ranched horn.
Also, rhinos aren’t exactly easy to farm - big hostile animals that take a long time to grow and don’t mate very well in captivity, right?
See post #39. If you want to mess with murdering bastards who will do anything to protect their profit margin, be my guest.
I’m not talking about messing with anybody. This thread is [apparently] an ethical question about whether or not it’s acceptable to sacrifice some rhinos so the rest aren’t poached. I previously said that wouldn’t work, and I’m saying that making artificial rhino horn would be more ethical than rhino farming anyway. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it were easier and cheaper, too. So that’s one more knock against the ranching idea.
Hey, leave my girlfriend out of this.
I’d guess the question is supposed to make the student look beyond the mere physical problem of penning rhinos (such problems being considerable) and explore why rhinos are endangered in the first place.
Well, the smarter students, anyway. The less clever ones are probably drawing up plans for rhino farms, debating where to put the troughs and such.
One day in the distant future, I imagine Big Rhino lobbying to increase federal subsidization of the rhino horn industry.
Another knock against the slaughterhouse idea(I refuse to dignify it with the word “farm”) is that, if such a plan succeeds and rhinos are able to be raised in captivity, money to save the wild rhino will dry up. “We don’t need to preserve those wild rhino and the land they graze on-we’ve got plenty of them in captivity.”
It *is *possible to remove a rhino horn without killing the rhino - just saying, all this talk of “slaughterhouses” is a bit of an exaggeration. Not that I think it’s a workable solution.
A workable solution is to flood the market with cyanide-laced horns or somesuch, IMO. Not that I’d condone that, either.
You certainly could ranch megafauna of all sorts but there are a number of issues preventing it. Ranching, even for preservation purposes is essentially a business that must see a return on it’s investment. As the number of animals grows they consume more resources and require more land. At some point you either have to begin slaughtering the excess or you will either go broke, or the entire “herd” will sicken from the lack of resources. So you have to have some method of paying for the necessities of the ranch. typically the animals themselves pay for this in the form of meat, leather, and studding services. I don’t see how this would be really feasible with megafauna though. They take far longer to gestate and mature and are not prolific enough to be utilized as any sort of significant food source.
That leaves you with the option of selling it an extreme premium to the very wealthy, or offering canned hunts for exorbitant prices. I’m not certain any of that would really work out well either. There is limit to what even rich people will pay for gourmet meal experiences, and part of the hunt is the possibility of failure.
I have no idea what question your professor posed but I’m not sure it made it here in one piece. That being said, from your follow ups…
It wouldn’t work in practice. If Big Rhino alone was pocketing the profits it would doubtful that even the 1999 price of $1400 a kg(PDF) would make sense economically given the huge start-up cost combined with the day to day operating cost, processing, carcass disposal, overhead, etc. But the scenario you propose is an alternative for poaching. So someone (the government?) would have to incur all of the costs above while releasing the profits to poachers. I doubt the demand is large enough to support large scale farming anyway.
And as mentioned above ranching would probably cause the price to fall creating a higher demand. A better solution would be to spend that money educating the buyers.
I wouldn’t mind cheating these folks because they were immoral but I’d feel uncomfortable with open season on cheating morons, or shortchanging blind people for that matter.