this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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The problem is that under Indian law, hunting non-endangered species such as deer and rabbit is just as illegal (most of the time).
And if they were hunting non-endangered species for food, then I would be outraged by a lethal response, but that's not the case here.
My point is that the forest laws and forest departments in India are set up to criminalise tribals whatever they do. Most of the rules date to the British era, when the government wanted to protect game animals from the tribals and farmers. So when tribals, who have been hunting boar and other common animals for thousands of years, are suddenly told that hunting for food is a crime, they have no option but to break the rules. Now they have a choice - keep hunting boar and deer every week and risk arrest each time, or kill a rhino and get enough money to last a few years. If we could relax the laws on hunting common species, I expect to see rhino poaching go down automatically. Some Indian states have more liberal hunting laws (for tribals) than others, and in those places you do see reductions in human-animal conflict.
If you don't want to take my word for this, or would like to read more, I would suggest the last two sections of An Ecological History of India by Prof. Madhav Gadgil and Ram Guha.
I am happy to take your word for most of it, but it does not change my view. I am completely in favor of identifying and taking steps to remediate the underlining cause of all forms of crime rather than simply punishing violators. That being said, the hubris that an individual, or group of individuals supercedes the survival of an entire species is repugnant to me. I have no sympathy for anybody that actively contributes to the the extinction of another species (except mosquitos).
The one point of your argument that I do question is the "kill a rhino and get enough money to last a few years" claim. While I have not looked into the details in India, as I understand it, poachers in Africa can make roughly the equivalent of an average 1 month salary for killing 1 rhino. If, in India, they make enough money to last a few years than either poachers are almost exclusively first timers, which seems highly unlikely to me, or they are doing it for greed rather than survival, which would negate your argument of the restrictive hunting laws.