Wildlife Loss

Wildlife is worth more alive than dead.

This is the core message, central to the efforts to protect the world’s most vulnerable animals, people and natural spaces. What this message eludes to is the complexity of wildlife conservation, which not only includes research, monitoring, management of wildlife and ecology, and ecotourism programs, but also efforts like:

• Mitigating human wildlife conflict – such an elephant eating your crops right before a harvest that will support your family’s school fees
• Reducing food insecurity – desperate times call for desperate measures. Families that are food insecure are more likely to poach for subsistence (food for their table) and to be lured into organized poaching rings for big game like rhino horn or ivory.
• Reducing inequality – imagine living right outside a game reserve where people visit from around the world, paying thousands of dollars to stay at a luxury reserve, while you’ve never seen an elephant in the wild. How can we expect people to protect something they’ve never experienced?
• Education – from formal schools to bush education to adult training centers, wildlife conservation is about community upliftment and providing opportunities for rural communities who otherwise would have few.
• Infrastructure and Services – increased presence from tourism or research means more traffic to an area. This typically prompts investments in things like roads, electricity, water pumps, and more. It’s vital to include communities in all stages of proposed development.
• Balancing maintaining cultural traditions with conservation – working with communities means understanding cultural heritage, including traditional medicines and rituals and working with leaders to find middle ground solutions to practices that may hard vulnerable wildlife.

What does all of this lead to? A wildlife economy.

An economy where wildlife is worth more alive than dead. An economy that is diversified, low risk, locally sustained, and locally controlled.

Some statistics:

• There are approximately 6,000 African wild dogs (painted dogs) left in the wild and the species is considered endangered.
• With one rhino poached every 10 hours and, rhinos are a critically endangered species.
• An estimated 100 African elephants are poached every day.
• Giraffes are now on the endangered species list.

Wildlife and wild spaces need to be protected, not just because they have a natural right to be here just as much as humans do, but also because they are necessary for ecological balance and the health of our world, and in turn, the health of our economies and other human systems.