Think [the box] ing discussion

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics...

The State is not your (or an elephant's) friend.

Heya Stray ;)

Interesting. While i think that that article is too simplistic and drawing conclusions which are based on too few facts, it does provide a good talking point. I will, off the bat, agree that just because the State controls something does not mean that it will be cared about better or valued more. State control is not always the answer. In *some* cases i think public control is better than private however.

Do people not care about what they dont have a direct financial benefit from..?

Starting with myself, i certainly care about plenty of things i do not own nor financially benefit from :P I wonder if this links in to my question about altruism then..

One quick example - there is a little vale a couple of miles from where i live. Some people (who need a good hiding!) figured it would be a nice place to dump all their shit. I, and a mate, decided that it was not a good place to do so and thus spent 5 days lifting all the stuff people had dumped and cleaning the vale up to a place of natural beauty again. Did i walk there often (and thus benefit), nope. Only walked there once, the time i found the rubbish. Did i think the place had value in and of itself, definitely.

However the article also suggests that with incentives people will act in a way which will benefit others (and one assumes the elephants). Sadly, we know that not everyone works this way. Besides surely perspective is vital and as peoples perspectives differ, so will perceived values?

In Australia we have a day called, Clean Up Australia Day – where people do much as Tim did. I think very few people would do what Tim did, but I don’t think that is proof of Stray’s contention that people are scum who only care about what is their’s. I think people are ashamed of being seen as different or of seeming to care too much. So things like Clean Up Australia Day give people an excuse to be good.

There are groups of people who risk their lives to stop native forests being cut down – it is a bit rich to say that these people don’t care about what is not their’s.

Perhaps people aren’t as good as I would like them to be, but they are not nearly as mean spirited as Stray would have them be. Watch parents at the park when their child pushes another kid off the swing – sharing isn’t an aberration, we are not nearly as selfish and self serving as we sometimes like to think.

I think in an ideal, Utopian world, that that statement is untrue. The government should be ours and the elephant's friends. The government's role should be to keep peace, and therefore aid the common citizens.

Yes, I know that we do not live in a perfect, idealistic world, so I understand that this is not always the case. however, I believe that people are good at heart, generally. And, its our job to help create the kind of government we want to see, and let the government know what issues we should be working on. Ultimately, its up to us to a degree.

i'm not sure ownership is the cause of care, in fact i don't think it is
i think care comes from the individual and community
i'm thinking of the plight of the fishing industry in the atlantic coastal region of the united states
i have a friend, paul molyneaux who wrote a wonderful book called, the doryman's reflection
in it he outlines the fishery and development of regulation
from my own experience in maine
the fisherman were wonderful salt of the earth type people and there was a tradition of private and communal fishing grounds
many were conscious of the health and welfare of the fishery and many were not and many became through competition disrespectful and overfished the traditional grounds
there were some very complex federal regulations that sought to manage this by granting geographic areas to certain licensees, seasonal restrictions and quotas on catch but whose practices actually accelerated the process
most of those fisherman cared very much for the fishery but they and other competing nations decimated it anyway
ownership or perceived communal ownership didn't help
i certainly wouldn't be for privatizing everything we want to care for as some automatic way to protect it

In the article, the Masai of Kenya killed the government-protected elephants. But why?

Well, the writer says it himself: to protect their property. So those elephants were killed for the sake of private property. The fact that the government was trying to protect them is a red herring. They would have been killed even if they were privately owned.

Regarding Zimbabwe, the secretive nature of the government there is being used, unfairly it seems, against the openness that allowed us to learn all about the elephants in Kenya. If the elephant population of Zimbabwe is thriving, then people are unlikely to be starving there. But that's what we've been hearing, isn't it -- that people are going hungry? So either the anecdotes about the elephants in Zimbabwe are misleading or outright lies, or the the anecdotes about hunger there are. Which is more likely?

Governments, like other organizations, can be run well by an informed public committed to holding government accountable. Nothing proves that government is inherently incompetent. If that were the case, all nations would be as equally bad at war as some are at social welfare.

You offer a strong a position, relyt. Of course, we do know that the anecdotes of the problems of hunger in ZimBobLand are in fact true...and the situation only continues to get worse.

Maybe I misread the article, but the line:

An easing of the ban on ivory sales would make the herds even more valuable, and so, paradoxically, boost elephant numbers

seems grossly misleading, naive and based on faulty logic - his argument being, if it was legal to kill elephants for their ivory, then elephants would be worth more to humans, and thus humans would want to encourage their breeding so they could get more ivory.

As I understand it, a change like making ivory legal would effect things, meaning that not all else would be equal, and so at the very least you wouldn't be able to make such a confident assumption. Also, it just doesn't make sense to me, and I don't appreciate the valuating of animal life in terms of what use humans can make of them. Animals aren't here for us to exploit.

Shannon said: Also, it just doesn't make sense to me, and I don't appreciate the valuating of animal life in terms of what use humans can make of them. Animals aren't here for us to exploit.

Of course this begs the question of why Are animals here? ;) Any takers?

Animals were here before us, so the more appropriate question is: "why are we here?" Although Kristjan, that does beg a good point. You should start a new discussion on it. :D

I can see where he is coming from Shannon. Look at cows, for example. As soon as McDonalds realized that it could make tons of money off of the animals, more and more were breeded. Or, here in Utah, where everything is mostly farming country. We realize something can make us money, so suddenly there's more of it around.
We just have to accept the fact that 99.9% of humans are small minded, 'shut inside the box'. The ones that aren't are the ones on medication, the ones in insane asylums.
Although I agree with you Shannon, I doubt there is anything we can do to change this thinking. I agree his thinking is highly illogical, that would just make more danger for the already low population of the elephants, although, in a small-minded attempt to think outside the box, I can see where he's coming from.