African elephant populations are very healthy, just barely qualifying for IUCN "vulnerable" status. They're not a significant conservation risk, but they are a big money-maker for Western wildlife charities and African governments. The genus has more than enough protected habitat and more than enough monitoring.
The Borneo, Indian and Sri Lankan elephants are all endangered, while the Sumatran elephant is critically endangered. The Sumatran elephant is overwhelmingly not being poached for ivory, but being killed due to conflict with agriculture and human settlement; similar problems affect the rest of the Asian elephant population. Only a small proportion of conservation efforts are directed towards this critical but extremely difficult issue - how do you protect elephants from people, while also protecting people from elephants?
If the protection of wildlife is profit-driven by governments, I'm fine with that. Maybe these other places where endangerment is a problem can learn from the other ones. If they can make more money from milking foreigners for protection, rather than land encroachment, maybe they wouldn't hesitate to try it.
Interestingly, rich people who want to hunt African wildlife help bolster and reduce poaching in these giant wildlife reserves. Providing locals an economic incentive to stop poachers actually works really well.
Many people are surprised by how hunters are natural allies of conservationists. In Africa, hunters bring in precious money to the thousands of community run conservancies. And the North American Model of wildlife conservation considers the rights and cooperation of hunters to be an essential component in it's successful defense of conservation.
My wife worked as a nanny for a surgeon who went on these expeditions. He had stuffed lions and antelope in his house, it was pretty wild. The pricing isn’t listed on these, but here’s a site that gives people an idea of the huge amount of money these hunters are willing to pay. An exportable elephant trophy is $60,000 plus hundreds of dollars a day for general amenities. A basic package is more like $2500, where you’re hunting things like wildebeests and warthogs.
The whole Cecil the Lion thing shows what happens when the general public gets wind of these hunting expeditions, and negatively impacted the revenue for these preserves, unfortunately.
I wonder how much China's ban on ivory has had an effect on illegal poaching.
According to an article last year[0], demand went down significantly over 2018, and it seems possible that there was a "snowball" effect on consumers.
The most proficient elephant killer is Allan Savory.
He killed 40,000 elephants "to prevent desertification", only to make desertification worse. That is about 5% to 10% of the entire world elephant population.
You didn't mention that this was in the 1960s, that he acknowledged it was a terrible mistake, and that his subsequent work has been based on trying to correct it.
Of course not. It means you misleadingly gave one side of the story. I doubt you'd like it if someone took the worst thing you ever did, defined you publicly by that, and didn't mention your efforts to make amends.
Look at this way. When I read your comment I thought, "what a monster. How is it possible that such a monster exists in this world." That's why I went to look him up. But when I read two or three other facts about the story, that feeling went away and was replaced by the feeling that I had been tricked. Had you mentioned that this happened over 50 years ago, your comment wouldn't have had that effect, because today's knowledge and moral consciousness, both of which you're relying on, didn't exist back then. But instead you wrote in the present tense, obfuscating that. You also used the word "proficient", implying that killing elephants was his main goal. And you put his stated goal in scare quotes. That just seems like a lot of misleading for a short comment.
40,000 elephants dead in the physical world with long-lasting environmental consequences = very relevant
1 man changing his mind after having done irreversible damage to the environment near the end of his career = not as relevant
He should be spending all his time and energy breeding elephants. Instead, he is giving talks about how he got away with this and making a living from it.
It doesn't change the fact he killed a lot of elephants, but it does make your drawing only that part of the story to our attention rather poor commenting IMO.
Also, is preventing desertification, which affects far more species, actually the wrong reason? Sure his analysis was wrong and so it didn't work, but his motivation seemed better than you're suggesting by saying "for the wrong reasons"?
The Borneo, Indian and Sri Lankan elephants are all endangered, while the Sumatran elephant is critically endangered. The Sumatran elephant is overwhelmingly not being poached for ivory, but being killed due to conflict with agriculture and human settlement; similar problems affect the rest of the Asian elephant population. Only a small proportion of conservation efforts are directed towards this critical but extremely difficult issue - how do you protect elephants from people, while also protecting people from elephants?