So why aren’t WE bribing local officials to go after the poachers? A multi-national animal welfare organization must have deeper pockets than poor local hunters reduce to poaching.
Because they would take the bribes, pretend to go after the poachers with huge amounts of energy and verve, all the while taking their bribes to look the other way from time to time, and keeping on keeping on. Ask yourself…why don’t we bribe officials in other countries to shut down illegal drug production. Answer…we DO…and we still have an illegal drug problem. Think about it.
-XT
There’s no probably about it. There’s a huge problem with wildlife smuggling in First World areas like Australia or Reunion. There was big scandal in Australia a few weeks ago about the illegal trade in dugong and turtle meat. You can be damn sure that if those regions had rhinos, people would be shooting them for their horn if the price was right.
Part of the reason that the trade is worse in developing countries is because of the low incomes. Poaching wildlife in Reunion nets, say, 20, 000 Euros, which is only a few months wages in France, and so hardly worth the risk of a 5 year jail term. But 20, 000 Euros in Zimbabwe is fantastic wealth. It’s more than most people will make in their lifetimes. Of course someone is going to risk it because it is well worth the risk, even of of getting shot.
You can cut down on corruption and make the country a paragon of law enforcement, and it will still occur while incomes remain low, because a rhino represents a walking bank vault, and plenty of people are quit happy to shoot *humans *to rob a bank vault.
Hell, I just meant having the game wardens shoot back, and having them hire well-trained guarsd who will also shoot back at anyone who tries to kill a game warden. I think that’s the most effective response. More seriously, while there are some complicated economic issues involved here, I think a real response to poaching has to involve changing the economics so that it’s more profitable for these countries to devote the kind of resources to preserving their animals that will stop people who want to put serious resources into poaching them. The humane issues are important, but outsourcing the poaching to government employees does nothing to cut down on poaching.
I would think that wouldn’t work out very well for the government officials. If they are getting bigger bribes to crack down on poaching, yet poaching doesn’t decrease, they are going to lose the more lucrative gravy train. That’s kind of how bribes work.
Can somebody tell me why, with the existence of Viagra, there is still a market for these? I’m betting an ounce of ground up rhino horn, or elephant tusk, or tiger penis, costs more than a $10 pill you can easily get from any doctor, plus its legal and safe and is proven to work.
I bet you could, if you really wanted to.
A big part of the problem is that you don’t need serious resources to poach rhinos, any more than you need big resources to rob a bank. All you need are a rifle and a car. That’s it. While the people higher up the chain are making a lot of money out of rhino poaching, the people doing the actual shooting are often just farmers with a rifle.
If that concept worked, then there would be no crime in the US. We would just pay cops more money to crack down on crime, and that would result in lower crime rates.
Of course it doesn’t work like that in reality. Poaching rates will always go up and down and it will always very between regions. There is no metric for the success of any law enforcement initiative, even in the US. That’s why we don’t pay cops based on performance. An official could be working very hard and being highly effective at preventing poaching, yet still see an increase in the number of rhinos killed. So what do you do?
See, these are official who you believe to be corrupt. If they weren’t corrupt, you wouldn’t be bribing them. These are also officials who know how to hide evidence of poaching. If they couldn’t hide evidence of poaching, the poachers wouldn’t be bribing them, and so you wouldn’t need to.
If you stop paying him despite him working his arse off, you are going to cause resentment. You are also going to cause an income shortfall that he will need to make up elsewhere. Now where could a corrupt wildlife official in charge of rhino protection make a few extra bucks, and piss off the WWF at the same time?
Worse yet, you have created a Soviet style system where any failure is punished. And we know from the Soviets what the result of that is: no failures occur. If you tried to do this, you would find that the poaching rate would drop to zero tomorrow, at least amongst the dumber officials. The way you could tell smart officials is that their poaching rates would show a steady decline every year. Yep, this system sure works. We implemented a policy of not paying anyone who didn’t show progress, and everyone showed progress. In some cases, as soon as we implemented the policy there was no poaching at all reported. This actually become counterproductive because not only haven’t you stopped poaching, you have also lost the ability to monitor poaching
Alternatively, you could keep paying the officials regardless of performance, which puts you back at square one.
First off, I’ve read that rhino horn isn’t much used as an aphrodisiac. It’s mostly sold to the Middle East for making ornaments like lamps and knife handles
Secondly, things like tiger penis are not just to achieve an erection. They are meant to increase “virility”, which means increasing libido, fertility, attractiveness and all round studliness. The fact that they don’t work and yet are still sold speaks volumes about the type of people buying them.
Related article.
That presumes that US police are as corrupt as African government officials, a fact not in evidence.
No, it only presumes that if you pay law enforcement officials more, they will be able to stop more crime. Or conversely if you dock their pay for not stopping crime, they will be able to stop more crime.
If you paying an African law enforcement official more will lead to her stopping more crime, then paying an American law enforcement official more will lead to her stopping more crime.
And if paying an an American law enforcement official more will not lead to her stopping more crime, then there is no reason to believe that paying an African law enforcement official more will lead to her stopping more crime.
This has nothing to do with corruption. It has to do with the underlying premise that we can tell how hard someone is trying to stop crime by noting whether crime goes down when we pay them more, and that if crime doesn’t go down we can stop paying them because they clearly are not working hard enough.
That was your contention wasn’t it? That officials would work hard to stop crime because if crime didn’t go down, the officials would cease getting paid?
That approach wouldn’t work in the US, so I can’t see why it should work anywhere else. If we started reducing police salaries in the US because the crime rate remained stable, do you really think that would reduce crime?
Are rhinos valuable enough that it would be profitable to start farming them?
If not, I wonder if genetic engineering could be used to make some readily farmed horned ungulate like cattle or sheep grow keratin that is physically identical to rhino horn. And if there’d be any market for that.
Unfortunately no. They aren’t a herd animal, so even for the grazing species you need something like 200 ha for each rhino, compared to 10ha/beast for cattle in the same area. For the browsing species you need even bigger areas and a more complicated environment to manage.
If you could do it, the market wouldn’t matter. You could simply flood the world with the shit and, since nobody could tell the difference, the price of rhino horn would collapse.
Nastier people have suggested impregnating the horn of live rhinos with arsenic or even various radioactive isotopes. They would be quite harmless to the rhino and not a major environmental problem, but they would render the horn worthless for internal use. :dubious:
If you cut off their horns won’t the lions eat them?
In case this isn’t a joke: No.
Adult rhinos are far to big to be bothered by lions, and of course the young don’t have horns to speak of. Rhinos use their horns mostly for fighting other rhinos. If you’ve ever been headbutted by a polled steer, you know that the skull alone is more than enough to inflict fatal damage. When you have 3 tonnes of animal hitting you a relatively blunt horn isn’t a major consideration in whether you are going to die. Only in how.
The horn is important against other heavily armoured rhinos of course, but not against thin-skinned cats and people.
I’m sure they’re also the people generating the stats on poaching. That’s kind of how corruption works. 
We need to get rid of all the RINO’s to make they party pure again!
No, it is not my contention.
My contention was, if government officials have demonstrated that they respond to bribes from poachers, it is logicial to conclude they will respond to a larger bribe to crack down on poachers.
And as as was pointed out, that won’t work because they will take both bribes and permit poaching anyway. Doesn’t matter how big the anti-poaching bribe is, there is nothing that prevents them taking it and still getting more from the poachers.
I had assumed that your point about wanting the greater amount of money had something to do with threatening to remove the anti-poching payments.
Since it apparently doesn’t, xtisme’s original point stands: they would take the bribes, pretend to go after the poachers with huge amounts of energy and verve, all the while taking their bribes to look the other way from time to time, and keeping on keeping on.
Your subsequent post didn’t actually address this problem at all. My mistake was in assuming that it did.