Understanding Wildlife Protection: Environmental ethics

Many of us want to help sustain the environment and biodiversity but everyone has different ethics and in turn have different environmental ethics. Axiology is the study of values but scientific studies cannot affect people's core values. These values can define our attitudes and therefore define our behaviour and can be loosely categorised as:

Anthropocentrism - Man is at the centre of everything, only man has moral standing. As long as we're OK that's all that matters!

Biocentrism - Everything living has moral standing, it is wrong to kill anything.

Ecocentrism - The ecosystem has moral value - this can also be 'Deep-ecology'

Sentientism - Moral value can only be given to thinking creatures

We have to ask ourselves what it is that we value? Many of us value the environment but legislators should also take a philosophical stance. The use of the Precautionary Principle, where it's better to be safe than sorry balances the biocentrism principle but we should ask ourselves if we are all wildlife criminals?

Environmental ethics: To encourage better environmental behaviour we have to think of how to control wildlife crime and maintain biodiversity. Wildlife crime can be controlled through prosecution and deterrent following the investigation and prosecution but first of all people need to be educated to the facts. As the National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) states:

“Everybody in the UK has a moral obligation to inform law enforcement of any criminal activity they are aware of, or believe to be occurring. Without information being collected from communities within the UK, the conservation of wildlife species remain threatened by criminals and offenders will continually to personally gain from their illegal activity.” (www.defra.gov.uk/paw/pdf/crime-assessment0708.pdf)

“Only by identifying and tackling wildlife crime can UK LEAs support UK Governments, current objectives such as reducing the rate of the loss of biodiversity. The challenge to all involved in combating any aspect of wildlife crime, both law enforcement and non law enforcement, is to take personal responsibility to ensure that all available information is shared appropriately to allow the UK to be confident that all criminal threats are identified and allow for effective management of threat to occur” (www.defra.gov.uk/paw/pdf/crime-assessment0708.pdf)

Environmental ethics and cultural values.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, environmental ethics is described as:

"The moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and it's non-human content".

We therefore have to consider how the environment is used around us, how we benefit from it, how other cultures and countries benefit from it and how biodiversity is affected. The value of these non-human contents also have different meanings and uses to different people. Who is to say what is right and wrong when sometimes things are for need rather than pleasure, tradition rather than want and ease of availability. We need to think of this in terms of wildlife crime but this can be difficult. What is a crime is not realising the effect of our actions on biodiversity and climate but people still need to be educated to this conclusion.

The video below gives an example of the human/elephant relationship in certain communities in Botswana. They live in an elephant based economy and it is important for tourists. Through conservation methods African states have bought the elephant population from 60,000 in the 1980s to 150,000 in recent years and have used ivory sustainably. In other parts of Africa communities are being taught how to manage their natural resources and use them for the economy through tourism. Central Africa advocate a ban on all ivory trade and are arguing that if southern Africa are able to sell ivory it will create a greater demand for ivory and encourage more poaching.
The video shows people from a community in Botswana who have lost a child killed by a herd of elephants. It also tells of human/ elephant conflict due to elephants destroying their subsistence crops, expanding their habitat into humans and contesting water resources. The members of the community are concerned that they will end up living in a desert. The video then goes on to a pledge to support Botswanas COP14 Proposal for Botswana to be accorded the right to trade in ivory. Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe have 175 tonnes of stock piled ivory which is expensive for the government to store. They also say that conserving the elephants is costly and they need to generete some revenue from elephant products. However, Kenya and Mali pushed for a 20 year ban on Botswanas proposal to trade in ivory saying that it fuels poaching. This was reduced down to nine years at the CITES COP14 meeting in The Hague, Netherlands. The sale of 60 tonnes of this ivory was actually authorised in 2002 at COP12 but there was a delay caused by the Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) project as they needed baseline data on elephant poaching and population levels. There was a one off sale of 9 tonnes in October 2008 over two weeks. COP15 proposals include a proposal by Tanzania and Zambia to change the status of the African Elephant from CITES Appendix I to Appendix II. Central Africa are still pushing for the 20 year ban on the sale of ivory.

ETIS (Elephant Trade Information System) is a database of elephant ivory seizures operated by TRAFFIC on behalf of CITES. Ekephants are illegally poached and killed for their ivory with large amounts of ivory used for traditional medicines, ornaments and jewellery. Here are a few links to seizures of ivory:

Chinese nationals arrested in Brazzaville for ivory smuggling.

500kg of ivory seized from poachers in Kenya.

Canadian art dealer gets 5 years for smuggling

Big jump in illegal ivory seizures

1169kg Ivory seized in Kenya and Ethiopia

DNA techniques are being used to identify where elephant ivory has originated from

Huge ivory haul

Ivory Trade - Would legalising it reduce demand for ivory? Would Governments be ethically correct in proposing to legalise it?

- How would legal and illegal ivory be distinguished? Carbon dating can be used to determine if the ivory dates back to prior 1947 and therefore legal. General forensic analysis techniques here.

- Would it reduce the price of ivory and therefore reduce benefit of poaching to criminal gangs?

- If there is a steady legal supply and strict controls of ivory will it reduce illegal killing of elephants? This doesn't seem the case.

OR

As the wildlife scientist, Dr Cathy Alexander in Botswana said: " Trade and value for species isn't wrong for people living in poverty but they need to look at what has worked in the past".

This is an interesting piece of listening on African Elephants by Andrew Luckbaker on the 5.8.09, Radio 4: Last Chance for Africas Elephants?

It discusses poaching of elephants and also the problem of how the older elephants are often the ones poached due to their larger tusks. This is a problem because it is these elephants that lead the herd in learning how to live e.g knowing where to go to find water in droughts. They are also the best ones for reproduction.

The programme also discusses how the conservation scientists estimate the amount of elephants killed each year and how much illegal trade there is in ivory.

Other factors in the wildlife depletion in Africa.

Hunting - Hunting can produce an income for some local communities so gives then an economic reason to conserve their wildlife. However this wildlife also encourages tourism and many tourists don't like the idea of hunting going on around them.
Reserves are set up and often used for canned hunting so tourists can take home trophies. I don't understand how these hunters can feel proud of their killing when the animal was not even in natural surroundings, not entirely wild as they are fed by the owner of the reserve and easy targets. It shouldn't even be called hunting.
Here is an introduction to Louis Theroux's hunting weekend in Africa where he spends time with tourists and the reserve park ranger killing for trophys: