Posted on 04/30/2013 8:42:17 AM PDT by chessplayer
(CNN) -- At the start of the 1980s there were more than a million elephants in Africa. During that decade, 600,000 were destroyed for ivory products. Today perhaps no more than 400,000 remain across the continent, according to Samuel Wasser of the University of Washington, who is widely recognized as an authority on the subject.
If this level of killing continues, if elephants continue to be slaughtered for trinkets and statuettes, in 10 years' time most of Africa's elephants will be gone and an ineffable symbol of majesty and wonder -- and the linchpin in the ecology of an entire continent -- will have been consigned to oblivion.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I pretty much don’t give a rat’s heinie what goes the way of the dinosaur any more.
What you going to tell God when he asks you why you didn’t give a damn about his beautiful creation?
There is a right balance of stewardship. It stops well short of idolizing the creation, which is what gaia-worshipers do. Let’s by all means have every zoo we can afford, and also try to avoid getting hung up about losing creatures (such as delta smelt) in an area when they are teeming in other places.
I guess ivory would be a good investment then.
Hey, thats the spirit! Kill off God’s creation just so you can make a stinking buck off it. I’m sure YOUR God would approve.
There will always be elephants if global warming doesn’t cook them away (duck’n & runn’n)
By the way small amounts of legal ivory are produced today from culled elephants (yes there ARE areas they are too abundant) and from natural elephant grave yards. But it’s long been banned in elephant territory to just hunt elephants for ivory, like used to be the practice. I feel it’s likely that biologists will find a way of growing laboratory ivory if it comes down to that.
So you’re privy to what GOD will say to me? Tell me more! Be careful, though; you’re taking on an awesome responsibility there.
While you’re at it, can you back up your viewpoint with scripture? That would be way cool.
Sure there are. Cuz National Geographic doesn’t have any environmentalist agenda and they’d NEVER inflate the numbers or exaggerate the outlook ... We’ve been hearing this “endangered elephants” claptrap since Ernest Hemingway bagged his last tusker. Yet there are — by this article’s own admission — half a million of them left.
I ain’t buyin’ it.
Typical response in here whenever something like this is brought up. The “it’s a hippy-commie-muslim conspiracy!” reply. Sad to say, but liberals are right about one thing. Most Republicans/conservatives couldn’t care less about the environment. They would strip mine the entire land surface of the planet if they could, and brag about what great Christian they are as they were doing it.
>> liberals are right about one thing
Being one, I’m sure you’d know. Or think you know.
It’s amusing the way you take your pet elephants and expand them to some mighty broad generalizations about the environment and conservatives and Christianity.
Get over yourself, Gaia. There is a GOD and you are not He.
Ok.
I'll go blast a couple of them this afternoon.
I sure hope someone, someday is successful at killing all fire ants from the earth. I hope he becomes the riches man in the world; he will have deserved it.
Then can I assume you wouldn’t be interested in joining my “Pave the Rain Forest” campaign?
The #1 foreign exchange earner in Kenya is tourism. Tourists come to see wildlife. Tourism provides hard currency and a huge number of jobs to a country desperately in need of both. No rhinos? No elephants? No tourists - no hard currency - no jobs.
I could say the same thing about the ivory trade: it provides wealth, it is a renewable resource, it brings desperately needed capital into Kenya ...
If other uses could be found for elephants — meat, hides, bone meal — then I would advocate a managed cull or production husbandry.
They are animals, nothing more. It’s time we stop crippling ourselves with childish anthropomorphizations.
Unfortunately, your analogy does not hold. The poacher in the field earns very little - a pittance compared to the living elephant’s value in tourist dollars.
It is true they are animals - but, unlike domestic livestock, animals whose economic value is vastly greater if they are alive, then when they are dead.
But the point is probably moot - at the current rate of slaughter, they will all be gone in short order. And in today’s political and economic climate, there will be no highly-publicized rallying cry to “Do Something!”
There will simply be a collective shrugging of shoulders.
I don’t know why you directed your “childish anthropomorphizations” comment to me; nothing in my posts suggested that I was attributing human characteristics to elephants, rhinos, or any other animal.
I dispute your assertion that elephants are worth more alive than dead. If deeper markets could be developed (as I suggested) for elephant-based products, I believe they could be economically cultivated as a commodity, much like cattle, buffalo, ostrich, kangaroo, and other meat animals are. That way an entire sustainable industry could arise around them and they could be put to a use better than serving as impressive props for a bunch of gap-jawed tourists.
They will not “soon be gone.” We’ve been hearing that same Malthusian blather for half a century and there are still half a million of them roaming the veldt.
And the anthropomorphization comments weren’t directed solely at you but at the bunny-huggers who assign human traits — and values — to animals.
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