Episode #723

[daniel1948]

Incidentally, I dislike PETA.

Several decades ago I attended a protest operated by PETA. They start out with a very worthwhile goal: To end the cruel treatment of animals. But they were disrespectful, mean, and unpleasant. In their attitudes toward people they violate every principle they advocate, since people are animals too. I never associated myself with them again.

[CarbShark]

I am definitely tempted by the appeal to nature (or naturalistic) - that if we just leave them alone to sort out their own issues with aged or aggressive individuals, that's good (and moral). But upon hearing the pro-hunting argument, it has a certain logic that is hard for me to dismiss.

Appeal to nature in this case would be to remove the human population, or to scale it down to pre-agricultural levels. And to stop any exports relying on more than walking. Which would probably work, apart from where the species have been reduced so much that they're dependent on purposeful artificial breeding to keep the populations viable.

The reason these conservation measures (hunting, culling) are necessary is that humans have dramatically reduced the population of large predators and reduced the land area of the habitats.

So the balance between predator and prey is tipped and without intervention the prey species would overpopulate their various habitats.

This is not unique to Africa. Most hunting in the US is based on the same principles. We eliminated wolves and grizzlies, nearly eliminated cougars and, without hunting, deer, elk, black bear and moose populations would become unsustainable. 


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[2397]

Right, because of the various impacts humans have and have had, it takes special efforts to avert extinction. Seemingly futile ones, as climate change marches on on top of all of it.

We still have people wanting to reexterminate wolves in Norway, because despite having a low human population density in a European context, there isn't enough room for them and the ranging sheep to exist separately.

[arthwollipot]

All this having been said, illegal poaching is still a massive problem and needs to be addressed. I wonder if that was something that was talked about at the conference that Cara attended.

[drmarkf]

I'm a bit late on this because I've only just had time to listen to Cara's interview podcast all the way through.

I'm an amateur photographer who has photographed in 8 wildlife reserves in South Africa, Botswana and Malawi: I'm doing 3 more later this year. I have had prolonged discussions on this sort of subject with several people in SA. including some currently involved in conservation and one previously an anti-poaching ranger. So I have some first-hand local experience, but am very far from an expert.

Some personal comments:

The SGU episode did get my skeptical antennae buzzing over the perceived lack of balance: for such a complex and nuanced subject there was a very superficial discussion and frankly a credulous impression created. In fact, I was misled by the words chosen into thinking they were endorsing hunting of all types in Africa, even canned hunting. That was not the case, as I now know having heard the interview, but this just illustrates my point.

I would much rather ban African game hunting entirely, but when managed as described by Cara's interviewee, personally I would support it pragmatically. The keys are first that it should only be done of animals where culling is needed, and secondly that it remains expensive and a significant proportion of the cost goes to conservation (in the widest sense - a major usually unmet current need being supporting & educating local populations, and making the animals valuable alive to them, and the interviewee was right to emphasize local population pressure).

So, in well organised countries like Namibia and Botswana this works, however I have been given loads of examples from my SA friends about other African countries where all the money goes to local big game operators (with only a limited amount going in to conservation via the basic licence), and sometimes to organisations involved in poaching and supplying Chinese 'medicinal products'. There is also a penumbra of conservationy respectability created by the Namibian/Botswanan arrangements that in my experience is used to weaken controls in the more weakly-organised countries.

For example, have a look at the Wikipedia report on the bow killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe in 2015, and perhaps anyone can tell me how much of the $50k paid by that dentist to the hunting operator went to support conservation? F-all, as we say over here.

I cannot see that import-export of trophies can ever be justified, and to be convinced otherwise I would need to see specific evidence that it is also not used to cover and facilitate movement of illegally killed animals and their products.

I am also skeptical of the strength of the evidence that each hunter in subsaharan Africa invests 1600x the amount (to conservation, or in total?) that each photographer does. That might be true in Namibia/Botswana where lodge & infrastructure prices etc are so high, but there are loads of cut-price operations in other countries run shall we say more 'flexibly'. A quick Google search reveals lots of differing alleged 'evidence-based' views on this.

So, Cara's eloquent interviewee was I assess reasonable as far as he went, but in my view an imbalanced pan-African picture was painted overall. I think a proper segment on the SGU is justified, after a 'deep dive', and I'd be very interested to listen to it. I also wonder if Cara is planning to interview anyone similarly eloquent but with the opposing view?

Anyway, to lighten things up a bit, here are a couple of links to blog posts from my most recent trip to Botswana:

https://www.microcontrast.com/new-blog/2018/11/2/patience-rewarded
https://www.microcontrast.com/new-blog/2018/11/30/panthera-pardus-the-leopard

[stands2reason]

"Throughput is speed." Not quite. Throughput is a flux, so it's more analogous to power and current. Admittedly, speed and fluxes are both rates of change with respect to time, so they can be thought of as 'speed', in a way. There is an important distinction, though. Throughput doesn't care how fast the information is moving along the channel. There's an old saying in the hacker community, "Never underestimate the bandwidth [throughput] of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." In that situation, you have a crap-ton of data moving along the highway at low speeds. Compare that to the internet, where you have relatively little data in transit at any one time moving near the speed of light.

In other words, the speed of the data is more closely tied to another concept latency (latency is the distance the data travels divided by the data's speed along the path).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

Throughput is data transfer rate (i.e. bytes/sec) across a network. Latency is the amount of time to travel betwen two points in a network, generally measured as roundtrip time. If you're talking about a small or time-sensitive request, latency affects the subjective speed more than throughput.

If you are using "sneakernet", you could walk a terabyte drive to another computer, attaining terabytes/min of throughput. But the latency would be several seconds at least.

[The Latinist]

For example, have a look at the Wikipedia report on the bow killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe in 2015, and perhaps anyone can tell me how much of the $50k paid by that dentist to the hunting operator went to support conservation? F-all, as we say over here.

What on earth does the effect of poaching have to do with licensed hunting as part of a well-regulated wildlife management plan?

[drmarkf]

For example, have a look at the Wikipedia report on the bow killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe in 2015, and perhaps anyone can tell me how much of the $50k paid by that dentist to the hunting operator went to support conservation? F-all, as we say over here.

What on earth does the effect of poaching have to do with licensed hunting as part of a well-regulated wildlife management plan?

Nothing, however anyone who had followed up that reference would know that the bow hunter who shot Cecil had an official Zimbabwean licence to kill a lion.

To spell out my wider point, in less well controlled environments than Namibia and Botswana there is little linkage between what the hunter pays and how much goes in to conservation. The systems are leaky.

[arthwollipot]

To spell out my wider point, in less well controlled environments than Namibia and Botswana there is little linkage between what the hunter pays and how much goes in to conservation. The systems are leaky.

I think this is a point well-made. There is still a lot of illegal poaching in Africa, and the resources to stop it are vastly insufficient.

[lonely moa]

In the last fortnight, I have killed three possums, two hedgehogs and a lot of mice.  All very damaging introduced species to Aotearoa.  I consider it my duty to protect native species.

[Quetzalcoatl]

We still have people wanting to reexterminate wolves in Norway, because despite having a low human population density in a European context, there isn't enough room for them and the ranging sheep to exist separately.

What is the opinion of the public?

At least over here I think the public opinion is in favor of wolves living in the forest. Bears too, though they are much less controversial than wolves.

[2397]

What is the opinion of the public?

At least over here I think the public opinion is in favor of wolves living in the forest. Bears too, though they are much less controversial than wolves.

Generally, the people who live where the wolves are are the ones who want them dead. As do farmers who have sheep approximate to wolves.

Around where I live they regularly shoot lynxes (not every year). There are more of them than wolves, but still only a few hundred. I recognize that they have to be killed if they are a danger to humans. For protecting farm animals, I'm thinking that that's another reason to not have so many to begin with, and maybe free up some territory for wildlife. Again the same could be said for humans. If less than 100 members is sustainable enough for one mammalian species, why are we worried about low fertility, and encouraging people to have more children, when there are 5 334 762 of us?

There's currently too much sheep meat being produced, and/or too much meat being imported. This article is a response by the minister of agriculture and food, to a question by a member of parliament about the overproduction of sheep meat. One thing that's being questioned is approving the use 1000 tons of sheep meat for fur animals/farms (which is an industry that's set to be shut down by 2025). There's another 1100 tons of sheep meat to spare on top of that, out of a total production of 25 100 tons. In part the overproduction is related to the drought and more animals being slaughtered, but it's also a result of policies to increase production.

It's actually not that much compared to our total meat consumption, 281 019 tons in 2017. Maybe environmentally it would be better to make sure that all the meat that's being produced is consumed, and instead cut imports and other production. I haven't looked at all the details of imports, exports, types of meat and how the emissions are for national meat production vs. foreign meat production, etc.

In any case we don't need to eat that much meat. Given that there are benefits to reducing meat production, having less meat available should be acceptable.

[CarbShark]

What is the opinion of the public?

At least over here I think the public opinion is in favor of wolves living in the forest. Bears too, though they are much less controversial than wolves.

Generally, the people who live where the wolves are are the ones who want them dead. As do farmers who have sheep approximate to wolves

In the US it's the ranchers mostly who opposed their reintroduction and would prefer them dead.

In some areas they're reimbursed for livestock taken by wolves.

[drmarkf]

By the way, there's a very good podcast series currently under way from the BBC called 'Beast of Man'. It's mainly about rhino poaching, and features the retired international cricketer Kevin Pieterson, who has now moved back to live in South Africa and is devoting himself to rhino preservation. It also covers some of the darker side of hunting.
Obviously this comes with its own spin and it is presented with some drama (appropriately IMHO, and KP is a controversial sporting figure), but there are a lot of interviews with people professionally involved first-hand, for example, with anti-poaching:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0783hz7

[ralfsen]

Bandwidth is very often used to describe the maximum data rate for a connection. But you could say that this is a mistake as the term probably was originally used (and still is) for describing a frequency range and not a data rate.
Throughput, as I understand it, is not a measure of maximum data rate or transfer capacity of a connection, but the current data rate for a connection in use.