jbird4049 wrote:
Disciplining elephants so people can make money off them? WTF? What is this racism shit?
You do realize of course that the reason the savanna exists for all the other animals is because of the elephant, right?
That the elephants have gone from three million thirty years ago to less than 280 hundred thousand to about 400 hundred thousand now?
The conservationist organizations were planning for its actual exstinction in the wild because of criminal gangs armed with heavy machine guns and using poison to kill not only entire herds but many other animals for the tusks of a few adult males? That battles involving assault rifles, machine guns, and helicopters between rangers and poachers on parklands have happened?
That one of the reasons elephants harm humans is because they move into established elephant territory and migration routes? And adolescent elephants untaught by their deaths relatives have gone on rampages.
Stop showing your ignorance.
You must be concerne trolling.
I'm beginning to think you are the one trolling. There is no way a person can be this ignorant about an entire continent.
You talk about how the population of elephants has shrunk to 13% of what it was 30 years ago. Well guess what? Africa's population has increased by about 250% since then. There is only a finite amount of land and resources, and Elephants are directly competing with humans for them. 400,000 is still an insanely high number, but I think the 1.2 billion humans take a higher priority here. What do these elephants give back to society by grazing on the plains, other than allow bourgeois internet dandies like you a sense of moral superiority? Africa has an epidemic of AIDS, famine, civil war, and
systemic corruption, but you are crying about Babar. Give me a break. Ivory is the meal ticket to fix most of these problems. It can sell for about $1500 per pound, and an adult bull elephant can have up to 250 pounds of this precious resource embedded in its skull. 400,000 elephants multiplied by 1500 per pound of ivory multiplied again by 250 pounds per elephants is 150 billion dollars. That's billion with a b. That is one third of oil rich Nigeria's GDP. Think about all the AIDS treatment centers, hospitals, literacy campaigns, and food aid shipments that could pay for. We are talking about a place where people scrape by on a few dollars per day. They are sitting next to an enormously profitable resource, and you are cruelly denying them the ability to better themselves. Maybe you should go live in a third world country and cradle a dying African child in your arms before you expend energy crying about a barely sentient wild animal.
I'm seeing quite a bit of covert racism in your post as well. You refer to the African entrepreneurs as "poachers." This is classic dog whistle phrasing. Poaching is a relative term. People in India believe cows are sacred, far more sacred than you view elephants, yet the United States slaughters tens of millions of cows. That means every time you eat a hamburger you are worse to an Indian, than a poacher is to someone like you. The Parklands are there for the people in these countries to use and milk to their full potential, not for you to visit and feel good about yourself. Many of these Parklands are built on tribal African burial grounds, which is another matter entirely, bringing up all sorts of questions about property rights. Since these tribes owned this land before the so called governments (which are illegitimate offspring of Colonialism anyway) the people have far more claim to the Elephants on it than the corrupt and ineffectual rulers.
You also mentioned how elephants harm people because they go into elephant territory. Elephants do not own territory. They have no legal standing. They are merely allowed to live there temporarily until the Africans deem it necessary to harvest the life-saving ivory from them. As to your point about elephants going on rampages because they do not have living relatives to show them the way, this is precisely why the PT Barnum mentoring program is so important for these dimwitted animals. Circuses show elephants the right way to behave around humans if they want to have a future on this Earth.
Well, if I had to choose between between sanctimonious and a jackass, I would choose the former.
