{"id":1007,"date":"2022-11-25T23:30:40","date_gmt":"2022-11-26T04:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/?p=1007"},"modified":"2022-11-25T11:04:58","modified_gmt":"2022-11-25T16:04:58","slug":"on-alligators-and-elephants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/?p=1007","title":{"rendered":"On Alligators and Elephants"},"content":{"rendered":"

As one travels through the central core of Pennsylvania, winding one\u2019s way along the Susquehanna River valley one finds many interesting attractions.\u00a0 One such attraction is the Little League Baseball International Headquarters<\/a> nestled in South Williamsport, which hosts the international Little League World Series late each summer.\u00a0 Not more than 10 miles south of Williamsport, overlooking the west branch of the river, is Clyde Peeling\u2019s Reptiland<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Reptiland, featuring many excellent exhibits of poisonous snakes, vibrantly colored poison dart frogs, and ponderous turtles and alligators, is a quaint reptile and amphibian zoo that is fun to visit.\u00a0 However, it was the gift shop that will really catch the eye of someone interested in economics and incentives.<\/p>\n

Set upon on of the shelves is a beautiful box containing the bleached skull of an alligator.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Perched above the box, anticipating possible outrage from the economically ignorant, is a sign that explains why the zoo is seemingly betraying its mission.<\/p>\n

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The basic message of the sign is simple: that by allowing people to own alligators we, as a society, are best able to protect alligators.\u00a0 Yes, that ownership comes in the form of farming and farming means that the farmer harvests the animal for parts at the appropriate time.\u00a0 But, intrinsic to the ownership is also the concept of stewardship.\u00a0 The farmer has invested time and capital in raising the \u2018herd\u2019 since his livelihood is based on the herd\u2019s health.\u00a0 He will zealously protect that investment in a way that a governmental solution cannot.<\/p>\n

Now a careful thinker may object to generalizing this approach to other species.\u00a0 After all, the second paragraph of the sign from Reptiland\u2019s exhibit, which reads<\/p>\n

By farming alligators to supply skins for the [l]eather industry, poachers no longer had an incentive to hunt them, and with no pressure on the wild populations, alligator numbers rebounded quickly.<\/div>\n

surely, can\u2019t apply to other endangered species such as elephants that are hunted for the ivory in their tusks.<\/p>\n

But the public alternative is what we have now.\u00a0 The purchase of real ivory is banned, various governments run ranger programs designed to protect the elephant herds, and still the number of elephants destroyed each year is in the tens of thousands.<\/p>\n

Many articles on poaching contain the same litany for the prevention of poaching, litanies that sound good on the surface but fail deeper scrutiny.<\/p>\n

As a representative example, Kate Good identifies three broad areas for the average citizen to engage in to stop poaching in her article 10 Simple Ways YOU Can Help Stop Wildlife Poaching Today<\/a><\/em>: 1) sign petitions, 2) provide donations, and 3) volunteer.\u00a0 Although the critiques against them overlap, let\u2019s look at these three in turn by comparing these efforts as applied to the illicit drug trade and arms trafficking, similar types of crime as poaching that Good identifies in her article.<\/p>\n

The US has had a vigorous campaign to raise awareness against the use of drugs for decades now with the most recognizable aspects coming in the form of the Just Say No<\/a> advertising campaign and similar efforts. \u00a0\u00a0Nonetheless, the use of illegal drugs has never gone away and, being generous, the best that can be said about the drug prevention efforts are that they have blunted the number of drug users by a small percentage \u2013 a valuable effort perhaps.\u00a0 The flaw in the thinking is philosophical.\u00a0 These programs assume that the key to prevention revolves around knowledge; that if the potential user knows drugs are bad then they won\u2019t use them.\u00a0 But this attitude flies in the face of everything we know about human nature.\u00a0 Generally, people know what is right and what is wrong (even if they don\u2019t deeply understand all the implications) and choose to do wrong all the time.\u00a0 The same holds for signing anti-poaching petitions.\u00a0 Which of the current spate of poachers is suddenly going to be enlightened?<\/p>\n

Next, let\u2019s look at providing donations.\u00a0 Good\u2019s first suggestion is to \u201c[d]onate through the WWF\u2019s Back a Ranger Project to benefit the men and women who put themselves on the front lines against animal poachers.\u201d\u00a0 Rangers, like police officers, serve an important role in fighting crime but, like conventional police, their primary function is to catch the criminal after the event has taken place.\u00a0 Rarely can any law enforcement officer prevent the crime from occurring, especially in the case of poaching where the victim is unable to speak or call for help and lives on millions of sparsely populated lands.\u00a0 The fact that neither laws nor law enforcers form a significant deterrent can be seen from the fact that some countries even punished poaching by death.\u00a0 If capital punishment doesn\u2019t act as a deterrent to murder which set of new laws is going to make the criminal suddenly decide the risk isn\u2019t worth it?\u00a0 Donations to other entities is even more ineffectual.\u00a0 As discussed above on the critique to signing petitions, which criminal is going to have his heart swayed by a touching video or post that comes across his feed?<\/p>\n

Good puts volunteering in the final category.\u00a0 She suggests that the average person can volunteer to help either the indirect efforts (petitioning, messaging, lobbying, etc.) or the direct efforts (patrolling and protecting).\u00a0 The same critiques leveled for the first two categories apply here.\u00a0 No government agency will benefit from volunteers in enforcing weapons trafficking and, I suspect, no ranger in Africa or India will benefit from a well-intentioned amateur.<\/p>\n

The solution lies in recognizing, as was done for the alligator problem, that poaching is symptom of the tragedy of the commons<\/a>, as Adam Magoon argues in his article Elephant Poaching: National Tragedy or Tragedy of the Commons?<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 The idea is to privatize the ownership of elephant herds in just the way that domestic alligators are farmed.\u00a0 Let someone get rich from a legal ivory trade in perpetuity.\u00a0 That someone will ensure that the herd is well cared for and in no danger of going extinct.\u00a0 That someone will police the lands with vigor and resources unmatched by the government rangers because that someone will have a vested interest in keeping the herd healthy.\u00a0 Some of the details of how to effect this change can be found in Magoon\u2019s article; others can be found in the general economics literature.\u00a0 But the first step comes from recognizing that when government (i.e., all of us) owns a thing, nobody owns that thing and that thing is, therefore, poised for destruction by the tragedy of the commons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As one travels through the central core of Pennsylvania, winding one\u2019s way along the Susquehanna River valley one finds many interesting attractions.\u00a0 One such attraction is the Little League Baseball... Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1008,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commoncents.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}