Elephants have become such a pest in South Africa that the government wants to shoot some. That looks like a victory for conservation. Almost 20 years ago the population of the African elephant was collapsing and the world banned the ivory trade. If today there are enough elephants to shoot, isn’t it time to rescue the rhinoceros and save the tiger and countless other endangered species, by redoubling the effort and getting the ban on trading them to work too?Not if you care about wildlife, it isn’t. Bans have many shortcomings. They are vulnerable to the constant need to spend money enforcing the restrictions on trade. Poaching is hard to control and is usually a low priority for the police and the army. And if demand remains rampant, as with rhino horn and tiger bone, prices rise and the ban becomes a way for illegal traders to make a lot of money.A better policy is to make wildlife more valuable to man, not less. One way that suits everybody is tourism. The gorillas in the Virunga mountains of Rwanda attract a lot of money from visitors. A second, less popular way to make money is to exploit animals sustainably. Killing individual creatures need not harm populations. Many animals may be farmed or ranched to create a valuable legal trade. That is what has happened with the vicuña, and with crocodiles and their kind. Rhino horns can be cut off without even killing rhinos.Yet the potential for sustainable exploitation is untapped. Although governments, greens and consumers have embraced the sustainable use of resources, including wildlife, the killing of large, attractive species keeps being shelved at the meetings of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Animal-welfare groups are more concerned with harm to individual animals than with the survival of entire species, so they do not want any animals killed at all. Conservation groups worry that sustainable killing is hard to sell to their members. A disappearing species is good for fund-raising; blood on your hands is not.Excerpted from an Economist article, ‘Use them or lose them’, March 6
