Poverty hardly justifies crime. It is a cause not a justification. They are still poachers doing illegal hunting for protected animal on protected land. Also poaching is rather lucrative, even if the government raises income 200% poaching will still stand out.
Poverty does justify crimes. When you need to eat, killing a rhino not so bad.
I hate this mentality where poverty crimes are evil but any rich guy destroying the lives of millions of people through financial schemes or to make a better profit are considered almost like good guys. This is completely fucked up.
So if they are poor and eradicating a species off the face of the planet, then they should get a pass? They have the equipment and skills to hunt non-endangered animals which would provide food for themselves and their family. Excess meat could likely be traded or sold. Poaching is not a crime of necessity.
There is a broad spectrum of crimes, from stealing an apple to mass murder other people. When you decide to steal food from the supermarket to feed your family it is justified. Hunting… I don’t know… deer or hogs is justified so they can feed their family. But picking a very lucrative business and say you are doing it coz of poverty is kinda fucked. Just for clarity: I’m not agreeing with gunning these people down.
Hunting is perfectly normal and has been a key to human survival since the dawn of man. It’s suddenly immoral because some capitalist country said so?
Rethink what crime is.
There’s a bit of a difference between hunting a gazelle for its meat and another for poaching an endangered rhino for its horn.
This is all relative. Their paychecks are nothing compared to what people have in the west, they are not eating lobster. Its like you get 1 usd a day for manual labor or 100 usd for a single rhino shot. So the difference is multiple fold. They know what are they getting into. It’s like someone asks you to sell coke. You know you will get easy money and you know the risks as well.
Yes, no matter how rich you are, sleeping under a bridge is illegal and immoral ! Shoot on sight !
yeah no if I can feed my starving family by killing some animal I would take that in a heartbeat. In contrast, if I can work in a factory and make enough to live decently I’m not going into the woods to try and kill something that can kill me back and risking getting into trouble with the law. Have fun in perfect actor land where you live though.
They can choose to hunt deer or I don’t know monkey to feed their family or even steal food. All justified. Poaching is extremely lucrative. Its like saying I’m robbing my sixth bank because I’m poor. They are not eating the rhino. I’m not OK with gunning these people but it is a shit act even if you are poor
Honestly, this is the biggest thing that sets off my 👁 senses whenever some version of this post goes around. It squicks me out in the same way as the “Somali pirates OWNED” genre of content that was popular a while back. Stuff that encourages and socially conditions us us to cheer the killing of people who’s have been brought to this point by hostile economic conditions.
It is important to note here how well-indoctrinated the US and Europe are to “point the finger” and absolve responsibility…
We don’t refer to stuff as “deforestation,” we call it “urban planning” or “development.”
We don’t talk about “poaching,” we just accept that farmers and the agriculture industry finds natural predators inconvenient, so we allow them to kill off coyotes, foxes, mountain lions, etc.
We have just as many people doing similar, but for some reason we’re only taught to lose our minds over conservation elsewhere, in the places where the US intentionally destabilizes (with Europe) to keep prices low for us. After all, it’s what our economies are built upon: ruin everywhere, so we can call ourselves the heroes for killing off indigenous folks to areas just for the crime of living and wanting things to feel fair.
Check yourself. This isn’t “the way”
Well, that’s naive and misinformed. And also irrelevant; endangered species are too important to the environment for poor people to justify killing them off to buy food. Poor people have agency and therefore responsibility for their actions too. Your stance is both anti-environment and anti-working class.
We can and should help the poor in ways that don’t involve absolving them of responsibility for driving endangered species extinct.
Well articulated. We can’t absolve people of responsibility just because they are poor, unless we absolve them of all responsibity and treat them like children, and put the ones who have no caregivers in a foster care system. I’m fairly certain nobody wants that.
Yes, I am aware poverty is not something you can just wish away, but they know what they’re doing. Same as the people illegally cutting down forests in Eastern Europe. They’re also poor but they’re also assholes. They also have a penchant for shooting people who try to stop them. Pretty sure them rhino poachers would do bad stuff to anybody getting in their way as well.
That’s exactly it: we’re taught “white good; everyone/everything else bad” and it seeps into our conservation and environmentalism efforts, getting spun into a tizzy about what happens in the Amazon or Africa, but, telling-ly, not really having the same depth and strength of emotions for wildlife conservation at home.
no, fuck murder.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck poachers, but murder is never the solution, it just breeds escalated violence.
Endangered-animal lives are much more precious to me than humans-who-are-willing-to-murder-endangered-animals lives, so I disagree.
What a great way to gun down any random civilian without proof of any wrongdoing. Just say they were poaching!
Actually they tried the normal way, where they didn’t shoot and asked the poachers to surrender / tried to arrest them. But the rangers would get shot and the animals would continue to get poached.
Seeing this as a problem, a new executive order / law was passed allowing shoot at sight orders at national parks / protected zones.
Poaching has reduced, the number of rangers getting shot has reduced. The number of poachers getting shot has reduced (they don’t wanna fuck around anymore).
Overall it has increased peace.
It’s not murder, it’s legal punishment. The poachers use gun violence against rangers, so it’s a reasonable escalation.
Murder is bad, but humans are the problem. And humans being stupid chaotic creatures, it often devolves in to dirty things like killing. You can say all you want about right and wrong but this is a messy situation and this is the solution they have been forced in to using, after trying the peaceful method for years
Eco-fascists unite, huh?
How long do any of you idiots upvoting this think it’ll be until these (so-called) “rangers” start selling rhino horn themselves? That is… if they haven’t already and this is really just them clearing out the competition?
Protecting the environment by shooting back at people actively destroying it
“Is this eco-fascism?”
State power murdering overwhelmingly poor people for a crime that should be a fine at most.
Yes, that is fascism.
Can you give one single reason why this can’t be handled with jail at most? They can’t hunt from inside a jail.
They HAVE to die?
Why would they do that I presume they like the rhinos because they are killing people on their behalf
Corruption? Indian rangers are basically police. They’re uniformed and armed, and apparently have orders to kill. ACAB
I was in a car once when the driver accidentally went into a restricted forest area, and he just gave the guards a bribe to let us out without punishment. They’re presumably better than the actual police generally, but in the tribal areas they can be just as bad.
taking a bribe because someone kinda broke the law without causing harm is not the same as killing the animals you are supposed to protect, like whole orders of magnitude different.
Yanks must like oil corporations - after all, they are killing people on their behalf.
They do like oil corporations yes.
That’s like what the US is known for. Liking them so much they invade countries
No. You are. This meme demonstrates how easily first-worlders will slavishly applaud fascist terrorism in the third-world as long as you wrap it up in green capitalism first.
The only thing these privatised death-squads you call “rangers” are doing is waging unrestricted warfare on impoverished brown people while (at best) doing absolutely nothing to hinder the mass-slaughter of wild life or (at worst) simply monopolizing it for their own profit - but you get your “eco-friendly” revenge-porn in exchange, so everything’s cool, right?
I actually don’t disagree with your general point, but the idea (and the fact that your fist thought was) that the rangers will turn around and start poaching rhinos themselves seems like a really odd argument to be making if your aim is the capitalists who create and uphold the industry in the first place.
E: like, you focusing on the rangers is exactly the same as other people focusing on the poachers - neither are in charge and both are there making money for people who would never get their hands dirty.
Yeah we have this in South Africa and now some of the “rangers” as you say, are campaigning to sell rhino horn themselves to flood and devalue the market. They say it’s all obtained ethically and all, or captured from the poachers, but I have my doubts.
Could this method be used to reduce illegal homelessness too ?
How do you know it’s not the other one that is satire ?
Maybe just say it out loud if you don’t think the state should exterminate undesirables on sight. You know, just to be sure.
