Wednesday 20 April 2016

Save Taiwan's Endangered Animals: Fuck The Aborigines?

"A coalition of conservation groups yesterday condemned draft amendments to the Wildlife Conservation Act (野生動物保育法) that would allow Aborigines to hunt protected animals for self-use or non-profit purposes, which the groups said could be used as an excuse for commercial hunting."
I rarely side with environmental activists, but on this occasion I think it is perfectly clear that this "coalition of conservation groups" have it absolutely spot on. What is almost certainly happening here is regulatory capture; the Aborigines have democratic representation, and with it, the power to corrupt this particular law that is supposedly in the "public interest" but which directly affects them more so than anyone else.

Full disclosure: I love to photograph the wild eagles, kites and falcons here in the south (and elsewhere), though I do not have the necessary time-windows to get up into Yushan National Park to see the really wild birds and other animals. That being said, it is not clearly my business is it?

Although I am generally against government prohibitions, I will briefly play devil's advocate. The advantage of a ban on the hunting of rare animals is that it is at least conceptually simple; there are only two variables to control: the level of hunting will be consequent to the likelihood of being caught and the severity of punishment. Whether this can be done correctly so as to actually protect the endangered animals from the hunter's traps is another question.

Yet I cannot see how a legislator could foresee the consequences of an amendment allowing the hunting of endangered animals for "self-use" or for "non-profit" purpose, and confidently declare that such an amendment would not undermine the very purpose of the legislation. What possible research could there be to support such a prediction? Imagine the title of the research paper: "The effects of self-use and non-profit hunting on rare animal population numbers".  The only credible way to see this is the cynical view: that this is straight up regulatory capture and the Aboriginal representatives, rather than trying to repeal the Wildlife Conservation Act, are trying to undermine it to the point where it will become a dead letter.

But it is perhaps also instructive to look at how they are doing it. Notice the language of the amendment: that hunting endangered animals would be OK for "self-use" (that is because the Aborigines know they in turn have "protected status" in the hierarchy of politically correct progressive ideology), and that hunting endangered animals would be OK if it is undertaken on a "non-profit" basis (that is because the Aborigines know what is taught in the universities and that "profit" is so often abused as a swear word in the language of politically correct progressive ideology).

The stupidity of all of this should be obvious, but it won't be.

If a government prohibition cannot be enforced without eventually being undermined by regulatory capture, then there is already another way which could be tried to protect these endangered species, and that is ... horror of horrors... for profit hunting based on clearly delineated property rights. When people have a property right claim on something valuable, then they have a strong incentive to nurture and take care of it.

Note however, that the above statement refers only to the nature of the incentive. It could well be the case that, even with a good incentive to take care of the endangered animals, the Aborigines would hunt them to extinction anyway. There are two reasons for this. First, there is the question of whether or not we have the necessary knowledge and techniques to successfully encourage breeding among endangered animals (probably we don't). Second, the Aborigines might simply have a higher time preference in this context and would therefore prefer to simply hunt the endangered animals to extinction, sell their prizes via clandestine channels and then get drunk afterwards.

One possible solution is to stop feeling collective guilt about the treatment of the Aborigines at the hands of previous peoples, stop paying them face and respect and start challenging them. One way to do this would be to alter or repeal existing legislation about Aboriginal lands so that anyone who wanted to buy them out could do so. With enough serious people and serious money to buy out the Aborigines, perhaps a serious for-profit effort could be made to conserve these endangered animals.

If that is unlikely, then a more long term solution is for the predominant male population of Taiwan to start mating with the female Aborigines and thereby bringing them down out of the mountains and into the cities and plains where they can be "melted" or "mixed" into the more general "Taiwanese" culture. But that would involve Taiwanese men adopting a sexual preference for girls with darker skin and bigger tits rather than the skinny, white, "ghosts with make up" that present as middle-class Taiwanese girls. It would probably also require Taiwanese girls to develop a sexual preference for the darker skin tones and rougher manners of the Aborigine males, or for the Aboriginal males to become more like Taiwanese male pop-stars minus the white skin tones.

I strongly suspect that the real solution to this, and other problems involving the Aborigines, is as simple as it is unlikely: vastly more amounts of inter-racial fucking.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment moderation is now in place, as of April 2012. Rules:

1) Be aware that your right to say what you want is circumscribed by my right of ownership here.

2) Make your comments relevant to the post to which they are attached.

3) Be careful what you presume: always be prepared to evince your point with logic and/or facts.

4) Do not transgress Blogger's rules regarding content, i.e. do not express hatred for other people on account of their ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation or nationality.

5) Remember that only the best are prepared to concede, and only the worst are prepared to smear.