81–90 of 320 posts
Evolution is in general very slow when it comes to animals. I have my doubts if poaching is the true cause or if there is some environmental reason.
What if unicorns at one point existed, but were hunted for the superstitious power of their horns, leaving only the hornless to reproduce and eventually eliminate the gene? How would we know?
Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=shel+silverstein+unicorn
For people who are not from the region but are criticizing poaching...maybe you should make sure your own house is clean before throwing stones at others. How many people critiquing this have industrial animal farms in their country, for example? And just to be clear: I don't mean that vile acts like poaching shouldn't be criticized, I more find the hypocrisy extremely grating, especially when it comes from meat eate…
Poaching is unregulated and ends up with animals going extinct. People who eat common meat animals are, in fact, doing the exact opposite and pretty much ensuring those animals don't go extinct. You may have good reasons to find meat eating morally objectively objectionable, but eating meat and complaining about poaching is not a hypocritical position. The rest of your post is simply a relative privation fallacy.
Sort of, but you have to add some nuance here. None of the animals we commercially farm in mass quantities for food are "natural" animals to begin with. They were bred down (in some cases over many centuries) from their natural ancestors to be a perfect food animal for humans. Some probably wouldn't survive (as a species) in the wild if the humans were gone. The ancestor species in many cases are already lost. More importantly, significant amounts of previously-wild ecosystems are now turned into commercial farming operations just to feed all these artificial animals, robbing habitat from the remaining more-natural animals.
I still eat meat. I just think it's important to not be naive about what's going on here. We've already largely terraformed what used to be the wild Earth into a custom-tailored bio-mechanical ecosystem designed to amplify human population potential. There are, unfortunately, not many great ways to fix it at scale without massively reducing our population first, and it's debatable whether we should even try.
A related notion is that most of what we call environmentalism isn't really about saving the natural state of the Earth (whatever you define that as!), it's about stopping our ecosystem engineering from going off the rails in directions that will ultimately doom us (climate change, massive pollution, etc). The Earth will be fine either way: if we manage to off ourselves through stupidity on environmental issues, nature will just go back to being nature again.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1338/
> Researchers found the number of tuskless female elephants in Mozambique increased by almost double over 30 years. This overlaps with a period of civil conflict, where armed forces slaughtered 90% of the elephant population to produce ivory. This ivory went on to finance the conflict. People suck.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally find the natural selection process to be beautiful to witness, the adaptive pressures to be incredible, and the cause to be tragic Not mutually exclusive
Context matters.
In case anyone is wondering about the size of the effect, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-... has the numbers. Before the war, 2-4% of female elephants were tuskless. Now 32% of newly born ones are. So it's a significant change, but it's not like this property was coming out of nowhere. It started off about as common as humans having green eyes.
Evolution is an umbrella term, but in the most general form, evolution means a change in genetics in a population over time. So yes, the genetic 'option' was there before, but it is advantageous now.
In case anyone is wondering about the size of the effect, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-... has the numbers. Before the war, 2-4% of female elephants were tuskless. Now 32% of newly born ones are. So it's a significant change, but it's not like this property was coming out of nowhere. It started off about as common as humans having green eyes.
I imagine the poaching process doesn't actually differentiate tusked and tuskless elephants, both types of elephants would fall into the trap and die? And then if it has tusks the poachers take them, if it doesn't have tusks the poachers just abandon the dead elephant?
Or does their trap actually trap them by the tusk?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sorry, but if you eat animals and yet critique poaching, then you are a hypocrite who does not give a fuck about animal welfare (because if you did, you wouldn't kill them). "The Good Place" covered this attitude a bit, with the Doug Forcett character, and showed the horrible implications of "you can always be doing more" as a guiding principle in life.
There's a world of difference between feeling that "you can always be doing more" and criticizing poaching on the internet an hour before sitting down to enjoy a steak dinner.
In case anyone is wondering about the size of the effect, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-... has the numbers. Before the war, 2-4% of female elephants were tuskless. Now 32% of newly born ones are. So it's a significant change, but it's not like this property was coming out of nowhere. It started off about as common as humans having green eyes.
As sad as this is, how does this kind of evolution happen? I imagine the poaching process doesn't actually differentiate tusked and tuskless elephants, both types of elephants would fall into the trap and die? And then if it has tusks the poachers take them, if it doesn't have tusks the poachers just abandon the dead elephant? Or does their trap actually trap them by the tusk?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its important to realize what this "response" actually is. Nature isn't actively doing anything. You have 100 elephants, maybe 5 are typically born without tusks. Suddenly you kill the other 95 for their tusks, leaving behind those 5 to survive and reproduce and next generation, 33 of your 100 elephants are without tusks or something like that. Over time, humans are acting as a predator in the environment, driving a…
I think the above commenter recognized that; that's exactly how these evolutions pretty much always work in nature, not unique to this case.