Saving the elephants one bite at a time
Many large mammals are critically endangered. Here's a controversial way to save them.
An elephant sized problem
The group of animals at highest risk of extinction due to poaching are large mammals. This is, primarily, caused by both the destruction of their natural habitats, and because their furs, tusks, or horns (plus whatever the hell people stil use from whales) are very valuable - either as status symbols, or for traditional medicine, or even bushmeat. There’s three main examples to look at: elephants, rhinos, and whales.
In 1500, there were an estimated 25 million elephants in Africa. 400 years later, there were just half as many. Another century later, just 400,000 elephants lived in the continent, around the same number as there are today. That means that, in the past five centuries, elephant populations have declined by 95%. Since popukation estimates for wild animals are complicated, another way of measuring them is by comparing the number of live elephants to dead elephants - the carcass ratio. A ratio greater than 8% means the population is shrinking, since more elephants would be dying than being born. Across Africa, the latest figures put the carcass ratio at 12% - so already at risk.
There are also Asian elephants, but there’s roughly ten African elephants for every Asian one, so I’ll focus on the former more closely. Regardless, their much smaller numbers mean they’re at a higher risk of extinction. However, it seems that Asian elephant populations have “only” shrunk 60% to 50% in the past century (from 100,000 to more or less 40,000 to 50,000), rather than by 96% like African elephants. India has kept detailed records of its wild elephant population since the 1970s, and it has increased from about 15,000 to over 25,000 (a 66% increase), meaning that conservation efforts seem to be more successful in Asia.
Historically, the decline in wild elephant population was probably caused by deforestation and loss of natural habitats, due mostly to expansion of pasture and agricultural land. Elephants, like most mammals, are currently at risk due to poaching - i.e. being hunted, mostly for the ivory in their tusks. Additionally, the massive decline in the elephant population during the 1980s (from roughly 1.2 million to about 600,000 thousand) led to the ivory trade being nearly banned, so sale of ivory products even by actual countries that document the origin of the material and for explicit conservation purposes being severely restricted.
A similar story is there for rhinos. There are five species of rhinos: two in Africa (white and black) and three in Asia (Sumatran, Javan, and Indian). To take the example of the white rhino, its population has grown from about 4000 in the 1960s to 18,000 today. However, this wasn’t a “neat” increase. Back in the 60s, there were roughly 2200 Northern white rhinos (mostly in the Congo) and 1800 Southern white rhinos. Now, there are over 18,000 Southern white rhinos, but just two Northern ones - both female, as the last male died in 2018.
The stories of the Northern white rhino are similar to those of the black rhino (from 100,000 in 1960 to just 6000 today), and the Sumatran rhino (from, say, about 1500 in the 1960s to just 59 today) . The population of the Javan rhino has doubled, although from just 25 in the 60s to 66 today. Finally, the one positive example was set by the Indian rhino, whose population increased from just 40 in the 1960s to 3600 presently.
Once again, the biggest threat to rhinos has been (and is) poaching them for their horns, which is why specimens under conservation (such as the two remaining Northern white rhinos) have their horns chopped off (they grow back, as they’re not made of ivory, but rather keratin). Rhino horns are thought in East and Southeast Asia to be a potent medicinal item, which is why about a third of all rhino horns seized worldwide were found in Vietnam and China alone.
Finally, whales. The whale population has decreased from 2.6 million in the 1890s to just 880,000 presently. But, unexpectedly, almost half of that declined happened in the 1960s alone. Species-wise, the biggest whales were the most affected: while blue whale populations dwindled by 98.5% (from 340,000 to 5000) and fin whales decreased by 85%, smaller speacies such as the Minke whale saw smaller declines.
Typically, we think of whaling as a fundamentally 19th century activity - think Moby Dick and all its disgustingly detailed segments about rotting whale meat, whale biology, or even whale semen. But in fact, hunting of whales for commercial purposes continued for nearly all of the 20th century, especially by the USSR and Japan. For example, in 1946 alone 180,000 whales were killed by a Soviet whaling ship to fulfill a quota from a 5-year plan, and Soviet whalers continued killing thousands (or tens of thousands) of whales until well into the 1980s, for basically no economically discernible reason.
Originally, whales were mostly hunted (fished?) to use their oil and sperm for lighting as an energy source. During the 20th century, the discovery of oil displaced whale oil in this use, but new uses were found: lubricants, soaps, textiles, perfumes, etc. And developments in naval technologies meant that more whales, of more species, could be hunted. Whaling declined after the 60s for two reasons: populations had become depleted, meaning that finding whales to hunt was too costly, and plastics were developing enough to be a reliable substitute. By the late 1980s, commercial whaling was banned, although some nations (mostly Japan, Norway, and Iceland) continue doing it - Japan in particular claims to be doing “scientific whaling” by state-owned ships, and then oh so coincidentally sells whale meat as a “research byproduct”.
The economics of poaching
A big problem with poaching is that scarcity of animals incentivizes it. There being fewer rhinos, or elephants, or whales makes their parts more valuable - so there’s more, not less, incentives to poach. Since supply is lower, prices get higher, and poaching becomes more frequent.
Part of this story is that, for at least elephants and rhinos, the products of poaching can be stored - so fewer elephants means less ivory, which means higher prices, which means more incentives to poach; and then poachers can simply hold onto their ivory for a long time. By this logic, elephants going extinct could even, at an extreme, be beneficial to the poachers - ivory prices would soar (imagine HODLing Bitcoin, but for animal carcasses).
An example of this was the bison. Bison killings steadily increased from the early 19th century to the 1870s, and then went into overdrive, resulting in the North American bison basically becoming extinct just 13 years later. In fact, from 1870 to 1874 roughly 4 million bison were killed, which was most of the US’s bison population. There seem to have been other factors contributing to the decline of bison populations though, like expansions of settlement into the Great Plains and disease.
One way to discourage poaching would be to do what is currenty being done, by protecting the lands (or waters) endangered species live in so poaching becomes more costly, at least enough to discourage most of it. This seems to be effective, but not very much: while mammal populations in unprotected areas shrank 71%, it oly did so by 56% in protected ones. And adding guards to the protected areas seems to have made an impact, because populations only fell by 39% in guarded protected areas. And some private enterprises began protecting endangered species like elephants due to their tourist appeal, although this phenomenon probably has a negligible effect overall.
Let’s focus on elephants, mostly because ivory is a very clear cut example of a storable product of poaching (as are furs, feathers, some types of rhino horns, and even some plants) with a high market value. The current model of conservation should have resulted in an increase ivory prices - less supply, at least as much demand. But instead, they have fallen from their peak during the poaching bonanza of the 1980s. Why? Mainly, because poachers are economic agents with rational expectations. If the government makes credible threats to crack down on poachers unless animal populations grow, then the hunters would have incentives to stay below that limit, to prevent their lifelihoods from being affected.
The Ivory Fed
But this approach requires poachers to believe the government is actually capable of enforcing anti-poaching commitments, and the number of poachers doesn’t have to be very large, because otherwise no poacher would think that their individual actions have an impact on the population. A somewhat tortured analogy can be found in fisheries. Fish populations are a classic example of the tragedy of the commons - a resource exploited by many people will be overutilized because each person maximizes their own benefit from it and not the whole community’s. The more countries share a fishery, the more likely it is to be overexploited, and smaller communities were actually able to form social ties that prevented overfishing. The more poachers operating on an area, the less likely it is that the government can convince a significant number of them to not poach unless it has the firepower to back that threat up.
Let’s imagine a scenario where an animal population is very small. If this is the case, then enforcing anti-poaching measures gets more and more expensive as time goes by, and at some point the government might just give up and allow poachers to hunt the species into extinction. That is one equilibrium endgame; the other, is one with a sustainably large population. Given that the ivory trade was only banned because there were so few elephants left, it stands to reason that perhaps it could be permitted once population reaches 1.2 million again, or once elephants become permanently extinct.
A final, somewhat safe assumption, would be that the cost of poaching is inversely related to the population but proportional to the amount of animals hunted, so there’s a highest possible level at which poachers want to cull the population so much that the government wants it to go extinct but not so much it’s too costly. Now, at that critical juncture, the government could simply spend a lot of money keeping the minimum viable population alive.
Or, and here’s the crazy part, it could stockpile confiscated products and threaten to sell them. Normally governments destroy the seized ivory (or in some rare cases, sell it), but they could just form ivory reserves to hold over the heads of poachers. This is actually very similar to the Krugman (1979) model of balance of payments crises: the government can defend a currency peg until it runs out of reserves, but right before it does, everyone will decided to “attack” it and buy out all its reserves very quickly to force a devaluation so they can profit.
Now, it’s clear that over many period, holding the stockpiles might be cheaper than preserving a tiny animal population, because you force poachers to play along and not hunt while numbers recover. But if all relevant species are poached, then sooner or later all of them will be at the threshhold for extinction - so it’s better to build up a store and prevent the “big culling” beforehand, to economize on resources.
The controversy
Now, governments promising to sell poached ivory to shady East Asian merchants isn’t precisely uncontroversial. Let’s cast aside the morality of it. Would it be a bad idea?
The stockpiles could prove counterproductive because the government itself has more than one interest. The governments holding stockpiles of ivory have two strategies: conservation, or purposeful extinction. Conservation means the stockpiles don’t grow in value, and the government can’t sell them for a long time; extinction makes them really valuable immediately.
Even assuming that stockpiling ivory doesn’t cost anything, and adding in tourism revenue for the animals, conserving elephants is so expensive at more or less real world values that governments could simply voluntarily let poachers slaughter all remaining elephants than wait for the population to recover. And since not very many countries have the kinds of animals poachers hunt, it is not that hard for them to coordinate this kind of thing, because elephants would have to be completely extinct for the ivory trade to be legalized again, so all countries have to give up on their elephants for deliberate extinction to work. If even one country has a reason to preserve a handful of them, that strategy would never work. Grim stuff.
Now, 25 different African countries have at least 1000 elephants, so collusion isn’t that likely. Plus, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume countries would, you know, notice that African states had given up on all the elephants left on the planet for a bit of cash, and would simply not allow for the trade of ivory to ever be legalized, or for extinction to never be “certified”. And since countries could have come up with the idea, and ivory prices were incredibly high in the late 80s, then it stands to reason that (very cash-strapped, not ruled by particularly scurpulous people) African nations would have already gone all in on extinction it if it were feasible.
Additionally, even the original assumptions are kinda shakey. As I already mentioned, there are some legal ways to sell ivory, and countries can barely ever get permission to do those - so it would take an extremely long amount of time to sell the ivory, which means it would certainly be too late when governments can try it. But the bigger issue is, habitat loss is as big a threat to elephants as poaching is, but the model used for elephant populations just doesn’t work if elephants can die out for other reasons. Many people in Africa hate elephants, because their big size and ravenous apetites makes them a threat to small farms. So the private aspects of elephant conservation are important: getting people to like big animals more, taking advantage of rich westerners to fund preservation efforts, and maybe even allowing private individuals and firms to own endangered animals could increase the “value” of live elephants and make it less likely that poachers are allowed to hunt them.
But private conservation efforts might just not work, or be abusive towards the animals, or do the thing some American tiger owners do of pretending the animals got sick and then euthanizing them. So the original point is stronger than it seems - if you sort out the kinks in the model, it might just work.
Or maybe not. Habitat loss is a huge deal nevertheless, and it’s also linked to people in agricultural communities simply not wanting to put up with obnoxious elephants just because Babar is cute. So killing elephants not having a positive market value is still not a very good way to prevent them from dying if they’re also dying because their habitats are turned into farmland, partly because they’re so annoying they cause significant losses to the people who are supposed to keep them safe from poachers in the first place.
Although, obviously, advocating for poached animal’s body parts losing value isn’t the same as advocating for the animals that are poached to not gain value while they’re alive! There’s not much of a reason both are incompatible.
Conclusion
Conservation of animals is obviously very important, and conventional strategies seem to have been successful (like, the ones for both elephants and rhinos in India, or most whale conservation efforts). And, let’s be honest, I just don’t find the case for a “Central Bank of ivory” all that compelling: it seems technically flawed, and its response to critiques are much weaker than I would like.
Ex-ante, it wouldn’t even work for whales or most kinds of rhinos, because the products they’re poached for can’t be stored for that long. Plus, many dehorned rhinos or elephants with very small tusks are poached anyways, because the scarcity of the animal also determines how valuable ivory is. And, since state capacity isn’t particularly high in Africa, it also stands to reason that the needed monitoring of the ivory stockpiles could cause too many problems.
All in all, preservation of wildlife seems important enough that this kind of thing has to be considered really seriously and rigorously, and maybe it just doesn’t pass the smell test.
Sources
Introduction
Hannah Ritchie (2020), “Mammals”, OurWorldInData
Hannah Ritchie (2020), “Poaching and Wildlife Trade, OurWorldInData
Gilbert King, (2012), “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed”, Smithsonian Magazine
The economics of poaching
Kremer & Morcom (2000), “Elephants”
McWhinnie (2009), “The tragedy of the commons in international fisheries: An empirical examination”
Berkes (1985), “Fishermen and 'The Tragedy of the Commons"“
The controversy
Bulte, Horan, & Shogren (2003), “Elephants: Comment”
Kremer & Morcom (2003), “Elephants: Reply”
De Alessi (2004), “An Ivory-Tower Take on the Ivory Trade”
Kremer (2004), “Response to De Alessi”
Leveraging internationally-applicable US whistleblower laws (eg FCPA; FCA) that target wildlife trafficking as a financial crime and/or customs fraud could also be effective in tackling the industry. The National Whistleblower Center has pioneered some work in this/is pursuing impact litigation to demonstrate it can be a viable approach.