always100percentme:kaijutegu:mellifluousbenthictones:forgotn1:twitblr:Keep it going for the 2021 and

always100percentme:kaijutegu:mellifluousbenthictones:forgotn1:twitblr:Keep it going for the 2021 and forever (x)This just made me realize that news articles always portray poachers as people from the area who killed them for money. But if they’re not being killed when people can’t travel there, then it’s not anyone from the area doing the killing. Makes me wonder how many of the “poachers” were actually trophy hunters from Europe or the US. ALL OF THEMIn reality, probably not many of them. If any. The modern narrative of who’s poaching and where animal parts end up is very much entrenched in the pulp novels of the 20s and 30s. Most people think of poachers as either a Percival McLeach/Negaverse Steve Irwin/old white guy with a mustache… or as a poor African. But the reality’s a lot more complex and the media’s bad at picking up on it for a lot of reasons- largely because people hate nuance and don’t understand the difference between illegal poaching (always bad) and legal, regulated trophy hunting (complicated. sometimes bad. sometimes good. depends on the situation, the reality of where conservation dollars are coming from, and whether or not you believe one animal can or cannot be sacrificed for the good of the species.)So here’s the thing about rhino hunting: it’s perfectly legal IF you have the permits. It’s just expensive. You have to get the permit to hunt and the permit to import back to your home country. Rhinos selected for hunting are old, post-reproductive bulls. They’re not really genetically valuable anymore, and having the ability to sell hunting rights encourages African landowners to keep rhinos on their land. Trophy hunts aren’t figured into the poaching numbers… at all.  When they say that poaching has gone up or down, they are not including trophy hunting because those numbers are totalled separately. Trophy hunters have to buy permits, and this is not a financial problem for them. While it’s not completely unheard of (there’s one guy in particular, a South African big game rancher/hunter named Dawie Groenenwald, who did bring in twelve Americans to trophy hunt on his land- read more about that here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/), that’s not where the real money is. I’m certainly not saying that all trophy hunting is legitimate or even if any of it’s a good idea. What I’m saying is that it’s irrelevant to the poaching numbers.The people killing these rhinos aren’t taking them as trophies. They’re selling the horns in Vietnam. Other Asian countries too, mostly China and anywhere that’s had significant sinicization, but Vietnam’s burgeoning economy and the meteoric rise of an emergent upper-middle business class has meant that it’s where all that rhino horn is going. It’s a status symbol, a way to curry favor with business higher ups (Source: http://www.poachingfacts.com/faces-of-the-poachers/buyers-of-rhino-horn/). This isn’t even a secret. The people who traffic rhino horn say openly where it goes (Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/). They talk about how it gets there, and who does the killing. It’s an enormous industry and immensely valuable. TRAFFIC has been working on this for over a decade now, figuring out who’s killing the rhinos and where the horns are going. Nine years ago, the first big report from TRAFFIC came out on the trade from the African rhino-having countries to Asia. Here’s the link to that: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/trafficrhinoreportsummary.pdfNat Geo did the numbers again in 2015, in that article I linked above. Things haven’t changed much since then.The reason poaching went down during covid isn’t that the actual hunters weren’t allowed to travel. (Besides, do you really think that if it was rich white dudes doing the majority of the poaching, it would have slowed down or stopped? Money, dear boy, can get you pretty much anything you want. A chartered flight to Kenya, a private home to stay in… a rhino permit or two…) Rather, the middleman dried up. It’s only profitable to kill a rhino if you can move the parts, and if your middleman isn’t traveling between the rhino countries and the Asian market, well… And you can probably guess who the middlemen are. Often they’re students. Frequently they’re workers. And until recently, they were mostly Vietnamese or Chinese nationals. Now, TRAFFIC notes that many rhino horn syndicates are using white South Africans due to heightened suspicion. (Source: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/environment/125451/profiling-ups-risk-for-asian-rhino-horn-mules.html)And normally, there actually is a lot of traffic between China and Vietnam and the rhino countries. I don’t know if people here are quite aware of the relationship between China and several African countries- particularly Kenya, but there’s been a lot of Asian investment into Africa. In Kenya, you see a lot of Chinese workers coming in, working on development projects, and then going back to China. Something like 20% of African infrastructure projects are funded by China; one out of every three is built by Chinese firms. (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-19/china-s-belt-and-road-leaves-kenya-with-a-railroad-to-nowhere). Most of the part-time labor is local (source: http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/801581468195561492/pdf/WPS7614.pdf), but not all of it- and the full time labor, while mostly local, is roughly 22% Chinese citizens. There were well over 150,000 Chinese workers in Africa before the pandemic (source: http://www.sais-cari.org/data-chinese-workers-in-africa). You also saw a lot of Vietnamese workers… before the pandemic. Both China and Vietnam called their citizens home pretty quickly. Vietnam in particular. By July 2020, arrangements for most Vietnamese workers in Africa had come through after a good deal of public outcry, and they were back in Vietnam (source: https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/19011-stuck-in-guinea-equatorial,-vietnamese-workers-forced-to-work-despite-rampant-covid-19-cases). No middlemen, no profit. No profit, no poaching. It’s not a triumphant story of white trophy hunters butting out of a place they don’t belong; it’s a much more complicated story of economic oppression of native Kenyans, South Africans, and citizens of other rhino countries and exported Vietnamese and Chinese workers. Poaching isn’t what it used to be. It’s gotten a lot more complex, and reducing it to something that hasn’t been true since the 1950s-1970s means that we ignore the real problems and direct our energy into something that isn’t happening. It’s like… how when a corporation tells you to take personal responsibility for climate change. This isn’t a single person sneering and shooting a rhino. This is an entire industry that CITES and other NGOs are trying hard to grapple with. The nature of the beast has fundamentally changed.  I get that it’s really easy to blame Europe and America for the shit that’s been done to subsaharan Africa’s natural resources. It’s right, too, but… the story of people attempting to extract resources from the continent isn’t over. Ignoring that the market for rhino horn isn’t the trophy industry just makes it easier for that particular black market to go unchecked.Additional sources and information:https://www.savetherhino.org/what-we-do/reducing-illegal-trade/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/rich-men-rhino-horns/529455/https://www.savetherhino.org/thorny-issues/trophy-hunting-and-sustainable-use-rhinos/http://www.poachingfacts.com/poaching-statistics/rhino-poaching-statistics/https://www.fws.gov/international/permits/black-rhino-import-permit.html- this oughta give you an idea on what a US import permit entails. If you have the money and time, it’s… really not that hard to hunt a rhino.Ha ha ha okay what the FUCKWE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT WHETHER IT’S HARD TO KILL A RHINO OR WHETHER YOU CAN KILL A RHINODON’T KILL ANIMALSIS IT REALLY SO HARD GOD DAMN ITAND WHAT THE FUCK IS “TROPHY INDUSTRY”??? You absolute buffoon, it’s just white people paying to kill animals with their big strong muscles guns to feel like macho men. If you’re so macho, fight the rhino with your hands I dare you. You might as well shoot a baby and dance over its dead body because that’s how macho killing a defenseless animal with a weapon is. Fuck off with your long ass shitpost trying to shift the blame from pussy hunters to the chinese/vietnamese. The post was about how nice it is that the rhinos aren’t being hunted any more and you have managed to derail it into a blame game. Great job sonny.That’s… well, that’s certainly a take. You seem to have fundamentally misread the actual conclusion of even the original brief tweet, and you also seem to have no idea what poaching is or what the term industry means. But the thing that’s baffling me here is that you seem to have a poor reaction to the definition of words.  Like, you are actually getting angry at words for meaning things, and that’s alarming on a lot of levels. Hunting, whether you like it or not, is an industry. An industry is a branch of an economy that produces a closely related set of raw materials, goods, or services. It’s one of the most basic macroeconomic principles, something American kids start learning about usually in second grade. Hunting is an industry. The product is dead animals and their derivatives: meat, hides, horns, antlers, bone, etc. Trophy hunting is a subset of that industry involving an animal killed by somebody who doesn’t intend to eat it- in that case, the primary product of the industry is the non-meat parts. (That said, the meat from trophy hunted African animals is virtually always eaten by the locals. It’s not like it goes to waste.) That’s exactly what the trophy industry is, and I don’t know why you felt so angry when approached with the term. I’m not sugarcoating anything or trying to explain something away by calling the legal hunting industry an industry, because that’s just what an industry is. Industries in general are a very basic economic principle, and in a post that goes into some detail about the economics of hunting versus poaching trying to explain why the initial response blaming white trophy hunters for a problem they’re really not involved with, it is assumed that the audience either has that very basic level of economic knowledge or can google it without getting vehemently angry. Now, pay attention to the actual tweet. Obviously my response is too long for you to feel comfortable with, but I just want you to look at the original twenty-five words. Notice that it doesn’t say that no rhinos have been hunted or killed. It says that in Kenya- one of several countries that have rhinos- no rhinos have been killed by poachers. Your response makes me think that maybe you don’t understand what poaching is. Poaching versus hunting is not a moral definition. It is a legal definition. Sometimes things that are legal permissable are not morally acceptable. This isn’t about that. This isn’t about how you or anyone else (who isn’t a Kenyan lawmaker) feels, it’s about the legal framework in place for the management of African wildlife and who is legally allowed to deal with it.Now with that in mind, what is poaching? Poaching is any extralegal killing of wildlife or killing of wildlife that belongs to someone else. See, African countries’ wildlife laws are really different than many other countries, particular American and European countries’ laws. In a lot of countries, including Kenya, where this tweet is about, if you own the land the wildlife is on, you own the wildlife. This allows for villages, incorporated groups, and private individuals to control hunting of those animals. The Kenya Wildlife Service pays attention to the numbers of rhinos in their country. They know how many are allowed to be hunted each year, and they don’t factor any permitted hunting into what is considered poaching.So for instance, if one herd of rhinos has 50 members and 5 were killed and 3 of those had permits granted by the government, that means 2 were poached. Not 5. Two were taken illegally. Those two are the rhinos that the Kenya Wildlife Service would be upset about, and those two would be reported as being poached. The money from the hunted rhinos goes to the conservancies and parks where they lived, and helps support conservation. You get that, right? That they’re NOT actually talking about what you think they’re talking about? That this isn’t a “no rhinos died” post, that this is a “no rhinos were killled outside of the number that we knew about and expected” post. Again: this is not a post about morality. It’s not a post about whether or not rhino hunting is good or bad or should be allowed or shouldn’t be allowed. This is a post about legality and economics and how Asian development in Africa being temporarily slowed by Covid is related to the cause of a reduction in poaching numbers.It has be demonstrably proven by multiple NGOs and conservation experts that the thing driving rhino poaching is east Asian demand, primarily in Vietnam and China. Nowhere did I say that rich white people were blameless, or innocent of all wrongdoings. It’s just that in this specific situation, they are NOT the people driving demand. Like, that’s… that’s a fact, and I’m sorry you’re so angry about things being real that you don’t like, but it’s people with reactions like yours- refusing to admit that to the reality of the situation- that allow these markets to go uncriticized and ignored. -- source link

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