The war on poaching

Three links in a chain, and the one that gets the money

A The illegal killing of wild animals for trade is discussed as a law-enforcement problem, and the framing determines the response. If the difficulty is that people are breaking a law, the answer is more enforcement: more rangers, better equipment, harder penalties. A great deal of money has been spent on exactly this over three decades, some of it effectively, and the populations of several species have continued to fall. The most heavily trafficked mammal in the world by number is a small scaled insect-eater that few people outside the trade could identify, which suggests how little the public attention devoted to the subject corresponds to where the damage is being done. The framing is not wrong so much as partial, and what it leaves out is most of the causal chain.

B That chain has three links and enforcement addresses only the middle one. At one end is a person, usually poor, who kills an animal for a payment that is significant to him and trivial in the value of what he produces. At the other is a buyer, usually in a distant and wealthier country, purchasing a carving, a medicine or a display of status. Between them is an organised transport network that also moves other illegal goods and that treats the loss of couriers as a cost. Removing the person at the near end does not reduce demand at the far end, and a network robust enough to survive the seizure of shipments is robust enough to recruit a replacement.

C The most instructive experiment concerns ivory. An international ban on the trade agreed in 1989 was followed by a marked fall in poaching, and its supporters treat this as settled evidence that prohibition works. Two subsequent sales of stockpiled ivory, permitted as exceptions, were followed by increases in illegal killing, which the same analysts read as confirmation that any legal supply stimulates demand and provides cover for laundering. Economists have contested both readings, pointing to changes in enforcement, income and consumer preference occurring at the same time. The disagreement is genuine and turns on how much can be inferred from a small number of events in a system with many moving parts.

D The argument for legal trade rests on a proposition that is respectable in the abstract and has performed poorly in practice. If a product can be supplied lawfully — from natural mortality, from stockpiles, from farmed animals — the price should fall and the incentive to poach with it. The difficulty is that the demand for several of these products is not straightforwardly related to price, that consumers in some markets prefer wild-taken material and pay a premium for it, and that a legal market supplies a laundering channel unless enforcement is far better than it is in the countries concerned. Farmed alternatives have been tried for several species without the predicted collapse in poaching. In at least one case the farmed supply appears to have expanded the market by making the product respectable, which is the opposite of the intended effect and was predicted in advance by nobody.

E Where sustained progress has occurred, it has usually involved changing who benefits. In several southern African countries, legislation transferring rights over wildlife to the communities living with it converted animals from a liability — destroying crops, killing livestock, protected by a distant government — into an asset generating income from tourism and regulated hunting. Wildlife numbers on communal land rose substantially. The model depends on conditions that are not universal: secure tenure, a functioning tourism market, and a species people will pay to see, none of which apply to a pangolin.

F Demand-side work is newer and its evidence is thinner than its advocates suggest. Campaigns in the largest consumer markets have been followed by measurable declines in stated intention to purchase rhino horn and ivory, and by falls in wholesale prices; how much of this is attributable to the campaigns rather than to regulatory change, prosecution of traders or economic conditions is not established. What can be said is that the mechanism is the only one that addresses the far end of the chain, and that it is funded at a small fraction of the level of enforcement.

G The intervention that receives least attention deserves most. Enforcement has in several places been militarised, with rangers armed and trained as soldiers and, in a number of documented cases, implicated in abuses against the communities around protected areas. Where that happens the local population stops supplying the information without which no patrol succeeds, and hostility to conservation becomes rational. It is a striking feature of the subject that the approach most likely to be funded is the one most capable of destroying the relationships the other approaches depend on, and that this has been known for years without much changing.