Fuck poachers, don’t get me wrong, but fucking hell, I wish people had the same kind of energy when it came to billionaires, who are literally responsible for the deaths of millions of humans (by virtue of hoarding so many resources as well as creating and maintaining a system that relies on exploitation and suffering to benefit them and only them).
If only society cared about oppressed and marginalised people as much as it does about cute animals.
Society doesn’t care about cute or endangered animals. The rangers represent a minority.
Society doesn’t care about cure or endangered animals
That’s bullshit.
I’d agree that not enough people care, but significantly more people care about cute endangered animals than they do marginalised and oppressed human beings.It doesn’t take a study to see the difference in attitudes and engagement (though studies have been done, feel free to invest your own time looking them up).
The fact that you’ve responded to me to focus on the animals but not on the people my comment is actually about is a perfect illustration of my point.
The fact that you’ve responded to me to focus on the animals but not on the people my comment is actually about is a perfect illustration of my point.
That’s all a narrative you created in your head. Besides, many of the same solutions that would protect endangered species would also protect marginalized people. You’re trying to make this into a Trolley Dilemmas for some reason. Who do you think are the ones buying dick powder made form Rhino horns?
Your attitude is the only real reason for any gun control in America.
Yes - the rich and powerful don’t want those they oppress and exploit to rise up against them.
Wow, watch me get down voted by all the redditors flooding the site. Wish they would take their bootlicking back where they came from if they enjoy the oppression so much
What the fuck are you on about?
His down votes must be because of redditors, so he doesn’t even CARE what they think! 😭
If you really don’t know, then you probably can’t understand. If you’re being ironic, you missed and hit moronic.
Well it’s hard to grasp someone’s point when they don’t actually articulate it.
Bro, your opinion is like the majority of reddit are you high?
What opinion? The only reason any piece of gun legislation has ever passed is to keep minorities and poors from arming themselves against oppression. That’s fact. Reddit is a bootlicking hellscape of do nothing liberals who want dasy government and mommy corporate to keep them safe and busy.
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Oh I’m not mad, just saw the instant emotional response to a simple statement of fact and it felt like I was back in the centrist circle jerk again.
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Yeah it’s whatever. I’m not here looking for friends, especially not in a meme community.
do you eat animals?
Only rhino burgers or long cooked stews made from endangered animals
shark fin stew, mmm one of my favorites!
Incredible. Even PITA migrated during the great Reddit exodus.
Great rebuttal lmao
My man! (y)
I, for one, fully support this development.
While I like the idea of every poacher being neutralised, I also understand that the “poach police” may intentionally/inadvertently kill innocents with their blanket immunity; plus many poachers may be poor af hired-guns that aren’t the actual source or root cause for the market, and may not dent the trade at all… Hope I’m wrong.
I also understand that the “poach police” may intentionally/inadvertently kill innocents with their blanket immunity;
Is there any evidence that that has been happening? (This article is from 2017, and it mentions “more than 20” poachers being killed in 2015, but doesn’t mention any non-poachers being killed, which it seems it would have, given it’s talking about the downsides.)
While I agree that taking the fight to the people financing the poaching, reducing the number of poachers - and providing a very clear disincentive for other “poor af” hired-guns to take up the mantle - could still help.
Personally, I don’t think any implied sanctity of human life extends to people who are killing endangered animals for profit.
American police
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ICE says otherwise.
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Me, too! It’s epic
We could reduce the numbers of Nazis like this as well. All in favour?
What if I told you that’s what the Nazis did to people they didn’t like…
Ohh wow you are very smart
Oh were not simping for Nazis on Lemmy any time soon. Twitter is that way -->
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Now compare the reasons why for not liking them
They did breathe as well, what’s your solution to that?
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Aye
Have them poached for their horns and tusks? 🤔
The lower horn of those Nazis is worthless, it barely counts as an aphrodisiac.
Not even L’rrr would touch the stuff
This will go, just fine
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/O_q12qYrCN0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Ought to disable Piped bot til it’s fixed. The videos don’t play. Google API shenanigans.
Eh I always upvote him anyway, he’s working the best he can!
No it isn’t. The WWF is doing this and the result is a bunch of paramilitaries running around killing and raping random people. Not to mention, in Africa, many of the “anti poaching” organizations are run by ex-Rhodesian mercenaries/officers. Just some old white guys who are rich and want to feel powerful by killing black people with immunity and commanding other black people.
Holy shit. Thanks for this counterpoint. I thought I was onboard with this and now I realize there’s more to this issue. As always…
“They were poaching. The whole village was.”
Dude I genuinely thought this was satire at first seeing it’s on the memes community. It’s real? What the actual fuck?!
Crazy how allowing people to kill other people would have led to racist killings
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Poverty hardly justifies crime. It is a cause not a justification. They are still poachers doing illegal hunting for protected animal on protected land. Also poaching is rather lucrative, even if the government raises income 200% poaching will still stand out.
Yes, no matter how rich you are, sleeping under a bridge is illegal and immoral ! Shoot on sight !
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yeah no if I can feed my starving family by killing some animal I would take that in a heartbeat. In contrast, if I can work in a factory and make enough to live decently I’m not going into the woods to try and kill something that can kill me back and risking getting into trouble with the law. Have fun in perfect actor land where you live though.
They can choose to hunt deer or I don’t know monkey to feed their family or even steal food. All justified. Poaching is extremely lucrative. Its like saying I’m robbing my sixth bank because I’m poor. They are not eating the rhino. I’m not OK with gunning these people but it is a shit act even if you are poor
Like yeah it’s a bad thing to do, but I can see why someone might do it once to try and set their family up. Yes they should be stopped and punished, but should we personally hold them in contempt? There’s definitely better off people involved with it, fuck them, and fuck the shit heads who are making the market.
One side is hunting animals.
The other is murdering humans.
Even beginning to equivocate this is insane.
Poacher spotted. 🎯
Oh, are you fantasizing about murdering me right now?
You’re an eco fascist.
Murder freak
This is the way.
You know humans are animals… right?
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Poverty does justify crimes. When you need to eat, killing a rhino not so bad.
I hate this mentality where poverty crimes are evil but any rich guy destroying the lives of millions of people through financial schemes or to make a better profit are considered almost like good guys. This is completely fucked up.
So if they are poor and eradicating a species off the face of the planet, then they should get a pass? They have the equipment and skills to hunt non-endangered animals which would provide food for themselves and their family. Excess meat could likely be traded or sold. Poaching is not a crime of necessity.
What if we shoot the wealthy people buying the horns instead? Wouldn’t that be better? I think so.
It’s like fighting drugs by arresting the last guy in the chain selling the stuff in the street.
But it’s always easier to blame and punish the poor guy at the end of the food chain.
You are using 2 different analogies that contradict each other. The poachers are cultivating a product, similar to poppy and coca plants, not the street dealers, and the wealthy are the buyers / “users”.
The problem is that under Indian law, hunting non-endangered species such as deer and rabbit is just as illegal (most of the time).
And if they were hunting non-endangered species for food, then I would be outraged by a lethal response, but that’s not the case here.
My point is that the forest laws and forest departments in India are set up to criminalise tribals whatever they do. Most of the rules date to the British era, when the government wanted to protect game animals from the tribals and farmers. So when tribals, who have been hunting boar and other common animals for thousands of years, are suddenly told that hunting for food is a crime, they have no option but to break the rules. Now they have a choice - keep hunting boar and deer every week and risk arrest each time, or kill a rhino and get enough money to last a few years. If we could relax the laws on hunting common species, I expect to see rhino poaching go down automatically. Some Indian states have more liberal hunting laws (for tribals) than others, and in those places you do see reductions in human-animal conflict.
If you don’t want to take my word for this, or would like to read more, I would suggest the last two sections of An Ecological History of India by Prof. Madhav Gadgil and Ram Guha.
I am happy to take your word for most of it, but it does not change my view. I am completely in favor of identifying and taking steps to remediate the underlining cause of all forms of crime rather than simply punishing violators. That being said, the hubris that an individual, or group of individuals supercedes the survival of an entire species is repugnant to me. I have no sympathy for anybody that actively contributes to the the extinction of another species (except mosquitos).
The one point of your argument that I do question is the “kill a rhino and get enough money to last a few years” claim. While I have not looked into the details in India, as I understand it, poachers in Africa can make roughly the equivalent of an average 1 month salary for killing 1 rhino. If, in India, they make enough money to last a few years than either poachers are almost exclusively first timers, which seems highly unlikely to me, or they are doing it for greed rather than survival, which would negate your argument of the restrictive hunting laws.
There is a broad spectrum of crimes, from stealing an apple to mass murder other people. When you decide to steal food from the supermarket to feed your family it is justified. Hunting… I don’t know… deer or hogs is justified so they can feed their family. But picking a very lucrative business and say you are doing it coz of poverty is kinda fucked. Just for clarity: I’m not agreeing with gunning these people down.
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Do you really think the poachers surrounded by wild animals that can kill them and ‘animal loving’ deaths squads are living lavishly and eating lobster and steak dinners?
This is all relative. Their paychecks are nothing compared to what people have in the west, they are not eating lobster. Its like you get 1 usd a day for manual labor or 100 usd for a single rhino shot. So the difference is multiple fold. They know what are they getting into. It’s like someone asks you to sell coke. You know you will get easy money and you know the risks as well.
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Hunting is perfectly normal and has been a key to human survival since the dawn of man. It’s suddenly immoral because some capitalist country said so?
Rethink what crime is.
There’s a bit of a difference between hunting a gazelle for its meat and another for poaching an endangered rhino for its horn.
Because otherwise rich people won’t get to see them on safari.
No animal life is inherently more valuable than one another. The concept is absurd and so full of contradictions.
I’m not about to cheer the violent murder of a human being to preserve a fucking safari.
Nah fuck humans. The worst animals of them all. I wont advocate violence but I wont shed a tear over a dead poacher nor rich horn buyers. Humans can just make more humans, with ease. Rhinos aint never called me bad names. Im im the Rhinos corner.
Yes, the gazelle can feed your family for a week, the rhino horn can feed them for a year.
Dead poacher doesn’t need food.
Eco fascist drivel.
You’ll be cheering when they start killing climate refugees in a couple decades
“Crossing the border is illegal!!!”
Honestly, this is the biggest thing that sets off my 👁 senses whenever some version of this post goes around. It squicks me out in the same way as the “Somali pirates OWNED” genre of content that was popular a while back. Stuff that encourages and socially conditions us us to cheer the killing of people who’s have been brought to this point by hostile economic conditions.
I mean, pirates aren’t just smashing and grabbing diamonds out the store. They’re holding actual workers hostage while the executives are on some yacht, so I don’t really care one way or another about them. But the whole “killing poachers” shit is greenwashing nonsense that not only allow vigilante murders, but also victimize random people who have nothing to do with poaching because when you put out a flier recruiting killers, you don’t get the most stable people
Yes, this is why financial crimes and financial crime laws don’t exist in rich countries!! Oh…
I did not expect so many upvoted poacher sympathizers in this thread. I am disappointed.
Poachers aren’t poor. They make assloads of money off their illegitimate trade. They have plenty of skills that could be put to profitable use elsewhere. They simply choose poaching because it is more profitable.
Poachers need to be destroyed on sight.
I mean, this is not really a solution. Poachers don’t do what they do because they’re greedy and hate animals, they do it because they’re poor and have often no other choice but to risk their lives to make a living, and they are probably getting something like 10$ per rhino horn. This is a systematic problem perpetually reinforced by the actual people we should be shooting: the millionaires who hire the poachers. They are the ones destroying the environment, exploiting animals and people and reselling those same rhino horns for ridiculous amounts of money on the black market.
Then they should be stealing from the rich. Not killing endangered species.
And at ~ $20000 USD/kg for African and ~400000 USD/kg for Asian, and them not taking the meat. Its definitely for profit and not survival.
It’s simple math, if you kill animals and get caught you get one maybe up to 10 years in prison. If you kill/steal from a millionaire you get lifetime of troubles and jail and possibly put your family in danger too.
Well, it appears trying to kill an Asian Rhino in India is much more dangerous than robbing the rich.
Or did you miss the part that they are killing the poachers?
“I missed the part where that’s my problem” -Bully Maguire
Poachers don’t do what they do because they’re greedy and hate animals, they do it because they’re poor and have often no other choice but to risk their lives to make a living,
Well, they’re risking their lives, they’re losing them in the gamble. No one owes you winning a gamble.
This is a systematic problem perpetually reinforced by the actual people we should be shooting: the millionaires who hire the poachers
Not saying we don’t, I’m all in for shooting a millionaire myself; but that doesn’t detract from still needing to kill the poachers: we can’t leave the reservoires and wild habitats unguarded merely to kill one or two twitter twats, so the job of millionaire killer we have to give to someone else.
we should be shooting: the millionaires who hire the poachers
Damn, I was looking forward to eating them. :(
But you’re entirely right. Obviously the poachers do the hunting, but there are people rich enough out there that put a price on rhinos to begin with, they are the real problem. They wouldn’t be hunted if there was no incentive.
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ridiculous amounts of money on the black market
Exactly. These aren’t impoverished farmers doing what’s necessary to live in some semblance of comfort. They’re greedy SOBs who don’t give a rip about anything other than riches. They don’t deserve sympathy.
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If we don’t protect the planet, it will kill us.
See: recent orca war.
I wasn’t there to see them but I can imagine the star trek memes surrounding that were pretty quality
Make a meme, the orcas are still trying to destroy boats!
Orca what?
Orcas have been attacking boats recently. Or it’s been reported more recently. Either way, they’re taking back their (wet) streets.
see: the farming industry
Begun, the rhino wars have
It is important to note here how well-indoctrinated the US and Europe are to “point the finger” and absolve responsibility…
We don’t refer to stuff as “deforestation,” we call it “urban planning” or “development.”
We don’t talk about “poaching,” we just accept that farmers and the agriculture industry finds natural predators inconvenient, so we allow them to kill off coyotes, foxes, mountain lions, etc.We have just as many people doing similar, but for some reason we’re only taught to lose our minds over conservation elsewhere, in the places where the US intentionally destabilizes (with Europe) to keep prices low for us. After all, it’s what our economies are built upon: ruin everywhere, so we can call ourselves the heroes for killing off indigenous folks to areas just for the crime of living and wanting things to feel fair.
Check yourself. This isn’t “the way”
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Well articulated. We can’t absolve people of responsibility just because they are poor, unless we absolve them of all responsibity and treat them like children, and put the ones who have no caregivers in a foster care system. I’m fairly certain nobody wants that.
Yes, I am aware poverty is not something you can just wish away, but they know what they’re doing. Same as the people illegally cutting down forests in Eastern Europe. They’re also poor but they’re also assholes. They also have a penchant for shooting people who try to stop them. Pretty sure them rhino poachers would do bad stuff to anybody getting in their way as well.
white good other bad
That’s exactly it: we’re taught “white good; everyone/everything else bad” and it seeps into our conservation and environmentalism efforts, getting spun into a tizzy about what happens in the Amazon or Africa, but, telling-ly, not really having the same depth and strength of emotions for wildlife conservation at home.
Poacher poachers poaching the poachers?
No, because they have a license to hunt poachers.
[Bollywood version of James Bond theme song]
Is this like the gramatically correct Buffalo-sentence?
Ah, the Hogwarts Legacy approach
Average Hogwarts student: Charms homework is so difficult, but later we’re going to prank that annoying ravenclaw by putting slugs in his hat lol.
HL Protagonist: If I can group these goblins and dark wizards together, I can kill a dozen of them with a single killing curse. Excellent!
Eco-fascists unite, huh?
How long do any of you idiots upvoting this think it’ll be until these (so-called) “rangers” start selling rhino horn themselves? That is… if they haven’t already and this is really just them clearing out the competition?
You’re telling on yourself with all that projection…
No. You are. This meme demonstrates how easily first-worlders will slavishly applaud fascist terrorism in the third-world as long as you wrap it up in green capitalism first.
The only thing these privatised death-squads you call “rangers” are doing is waging unrestricted warfare on impoverished brown people while (at best) doing absolutely nothing to hinder the mass-slaughter of wild life or (at worst) simply monopolizing it for their own profit - but you get your “eco-friendly” revenge-porn in exchange, so everything’s cool, right?
I actually don’t disagree with your general point, but the idea (and the fact that your fist thought was) that the rangers will turn around and start poaching rhinos themselves seems like a really odd argument to be making if your aim is the capitalists who create and uphold the industry in the first place.
E: like, you focusing on the rangers is exactly the same as other people focusing on the poachers - neither are in charge and both are there making money for people who would never get their hands dirty.
that the rangers will turn around and start poaching rhinos themselves
None of this is difficult to understand - it’s no different than the right-wing death squads the US trained to fight their little “War On Drugs” suddenly and not-so-mysteriously ending up the biggest players in the drug-smuggling business.
Who did you think these “rangers” work for? They are pigs - that’s what they are. And like all pigs, profiting from the illegal things they are (supposedly) “preventing” is merely one of the unspoken but universal perks of the job. As long as their violence serves the capitalists that wants to exclusively loot and pillage natural resources, everybody in power will turn a blind eye. And it’s not just the trade in animal parts - don’t be surprised when it’s discovered that these privatized goon squads being lauded in the media for their (supposed) “anti-poaching” activities take their orders from multi-national mining corporations or companies that want to exploit local populations as cheap labor.
I’m Indian, although I live hundreds of kilometres away from the place in question. My very first thought was that these rangers are going to kill innocent people and frame them as poachers. My second thought was that at least a few of them might start poaching themselves.
I hope I’m wrong, maybe this is one of the few such programmes that actually works out, but the history of the Indian forest department does not inspire much confidence. The Forest department was created by the British to protect game from local people, and even today far too many officials treat the indigenous tribals as enemies, rather than as allies in conservation.
If you think I’m being too cynical or melodramatic, you are welcome to read articles and books by Indian ecologists, historians and conservationists such as Madhav Gadgil, Ullas Karanth and Ram Guha.
I hope I’m wrong,
You’re not.
Why would they do that I presume they like the rhinos because they are killing people on their behalf
It’s almost as if accountable killings being backed and cheered on by powerful governments and business interest attracts the wrong crowd. If Jeff Dahmer was stronger and smarter im sure he would’ve applied to similar organizations .
https://newspaper.animalpeopleforum.org/1999/04/01/can-mercenary-management-stop-poaching-in-africa/
Operation Lock was apparently the first major privately funded African antipoaching project, and may have been the most sinister, not least because poachers may have been among the major beneficiaries of it.
“To implement Operation Lock,” Ellis wrote, “Dr. Hanks commissioned KAS Enterprises Ltd., whose chair was the late Sir David Stirling, the founder of the Special Air Services. Many of the KAS staff were former members of the SAS. The initial aim was to gather intelligence, but it developed into a more ambitious project to employ former SAS men for paramilitary anti-poaching work throughout Southern Africa, and bought equipment from the South African Defense Force. At least £75,000 of Prince Bernhard’s donation was used to buy rhino horn.” As Ellis added, even then it was no secret that “Many of the ivory and horn traffickers in southern Africa” were “also known to deal in drugs, weapons and ammunition, sometimes with the conivance of senior officers of the South African Defence Force.”
Craig Van Note, executive vice president of the WWF subsidiary TRAFFIC, outlined what WWF already knew in a mid-1988 article for Earth Island Journal. “The South African military,” Van Note charged, “has cynically aided the virtual annihilation of the once great elephant herds of Angola. Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebel forces in Angola, largely supplied by South Africa, have killed perhaps 100,000 elephants to help finance the 12-year-old conflict. Most of the tusks have been carried out on South African air transports or trucks, although some move through Zaire and Burundi.”
Corruption? Indian rangers are basically police. They’re uniformed and armed, and apparently have orders to kill. ACAB
I was in a car once when the driver accidentally went into a restricted forest area, and he just gave the guards a bribe to let us out without punishment. They’re presumably better than the actual police generally, but in the tribal areas they can be just as bad.
taking a bribe because someone kinda broke the law without causing harm is not the same as killing the animals you are supposed to protect, like whole orders of magnitude different.
Yeah I’m not saying those two are the same things. However I read some articles where tribal people and villagers claimed to be shot on sight for wandering into parks, then tortured for protesting this.
My point was just that the sentiment for forest rangers in the US or elsewhere doesn’t necessarily apply to India. The forest department might be more like the Bureau of Indian Affairs in some cases
However I read some articles where tribal people and villagers claimed to be shot on sight for wandering into parks, then tortured for protesting this.
that’s interesting. much more compelling than the other things.
Think about the kind of person that would sign up to murder other people.
You think they wouldn’t shoot an innocent person for fun?
Yanks must like oil corporations - after all, they are killing people on their behalf.
They do like oil corporations yes.
That’s like what the US is known for. Liking them so much they invade countries
Right? What a bizarre attempt at a dunk
Or even just do straight up high seas piracy of oil tankers, like with Venezuela and Iran
Protecting the environment by shooting back at people actively destroying it
“Is this eco-fascism?”Most of the people doing it are not some government organization. They’re often ragtag militias or straight up PMCs posing as environmentalists. In Africa particularly, many of these “anti poaching” militias are owned by former Rhodesian officers
You’ll do a lot more to protect the environment by killing coke executives and giving the money to the villagers nearby so they can stop poaching.
State power murdering overwhelmingly poor people for a crime that should be a fine at most.
Yes, that is fascism.
Can you give one single reason why this can’t be handled with jail at most? They can’t hunt from inside a jail.
They HAVE to die?
These freaks will go gaga over Blackwater and Erik Prince if he rebranded to environmentalism and went around killing villagers in the name of protecting unicorns. Liberals decry communists’ jokes about purges while they’re actively cheering on and financially backing vigilante murders by mercenaries.
Oh look… somebody who thought Captain Planet cartoons were actually documentaries!
Yeah this is a fucking stupid take. I bet those native americans are just trying to dump oil on the land themselves.
Yeah we have this in South Africa and now some of the “rangers” as you say, are campaigning to sell rhino horn themselves to flood and devalue the market. They say it’s all obtained ethically and all, or captured from the poachers, but I have my doubts.
Pig is as pig does. There is no reason for doubts.
Did you mean “eco-terrorism?”
Nope.
That would have made slightly more sense…
This is state power being used to murder undesirables.
That’s fascism. Terrorism would be non state actors
Didn’t know that, thanks for the info and thanks to the person who posted that other article.
My confusion with the OCommenter was due to that.
That’s not true… the term “terrorism” was originally used to describe the actions of states - it’s only due to the media that, for rather obvious reasons, states have been “absolved” from the vastly greater levels of terrorism they commit in contrast to the comparatively minor levels committed by non-state actors.
So yes, this is terrorism. I’t s not “eco-terrorism” (which is mostly a non-issue invented by the media) - it’s bog-standard, common-or-garden-variety fascist terrorism. The kind the media goes out of it’s way to never call terrorism.
Nope. It wouldn’t.
no, fuck murder.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck poachers, but murder is never the solution, it just breeds escalated violence.
Actually they tried the normal way, where they didn’t shoot and asked the poachers to surrender / tried to arrest them. But the rangers would get shot and the animals would continue to get poached.
Seeing this as a problem, a new executive order / law was passed allowing shoot at sight orders at national parks / protected zones.
Poaching has reduced, the number of rangers getting shot has reduced. The number of poachers getting shot has reduced (they don’t wanna fuck around anymore).
Overall it has increased peace.
It’s not murder, it’s legal punishment. The poachers use gun violence against rangers, so it’s a reasonable escalation.
It clearly says “on sight”
You don’t want to wait for them to shoot first, you just want to murder them.
No society on earth considers shooting on sight to be legal punishment
Murder is bad, but humans are the problem. And humans being stupid chaotic creatures, it often devolves in to dirty things like killing. You can say all you want about right and wrong but this is a messy situation and this is the solution they have been forced in to using, after trying the peaceful method for years
Endangered-animal lives are much more precious to me than humans-who-are-willing-to-murder-endangered-animals lives, so I disagree.
What a great way to gun down any random civilian without proof of any wrongdoing. Just say they were poaching!
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I am more alluding to the risk of collateral
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This would become my full-time job if I ever became independently wealthy.
