Capitol Ideas/The Giant Rat of Kenya
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS THE GIANT RAT OF KENYA by Tom Bethell 0 n January 15, ABC's "World News Tonight" broadcast a news story about the African rhino, pointing out that a lady in Kenya named Anna Merz...
...Shouldn't they be the property of all the people...
...Library Journal "Sword of the Shaheen is a winner...
...Perhaps those who wish to save the elephant are simply misled by the no-trade ideology of many American and European environmentalists," Simmons and Kreuter wrote, calling this a "biological imperialism imposed regardless of local realities and values for wildlife...
...Highly recommended...
...conservationist" approach to the elephant is precisely analogous to that...
...In Zimbabwe, legislation transferred ownership of the country's wildlife from the government to the people on whose land it roams...
...Zimbabwe's policies (write Simmons and Kreuter) "are based on the belief that the best way to protect elephants is to ensure that people benefit from their use and thus have a vested interest in their preservation...
...Charles M. Simpson IQ, USA (Ret...
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...They should realize, however, that governments are fickle, composed of humans who are not incapable of changing their minds...
...He told me that for a long time he was a liberal (in the sixties, he said, liberalism seemed to be the only respectable course), and for more than four years he worked for the Environmental Protection Agency...
...If the ivory ban works (which God forbid, from the elephant's point of view), the elephant will nonetheless remain a large, hungry, and destructive animal —a "giant rat"—with no prospect that sale of its ivory will be able to offset the cost of preserving it by fencing it in and of foregoing any other use of the territory set aside for it...
...Congressman Via Weber Every month when I receive MediaWatch, I can just see and hear the leftwingers in the major media gnashing their teeth...
...BOX 1764BEA, Novato, CA 94948, within 15 days after you receive it, and well refund your full purchase price . Presidio Press, P.O...
...Pay attention now, class...
...If ivory sales were legal, however, and ownership of elephants were transferred from the state to the people, individual Kenyans would have an incentive to protect the elephant and to hire Africans as guards rather than poachers...
...joined with most of the rest of the world in a general ban on all trade in elephant products, including hides and ivory...
...Ivory and hide sales are illegal...
...For just $29.00, you will receive 12 monthly issues of the newsletter MediaWatch...
...Rick Stroup pf the Political Economy Research Center, and John Baden, chairman of the Foundation Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...What effect has the international ban on importing ivory had on the ivory market...
...This contrived to indict callous zoo-keepers who sell surplus animals to "big game" ranches rather than exterminate them "humanely...
...The War Patrols of the U S.S...
...This is bad news for the elephant, Smith said...
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...Fred Smith told me over breakfast one day that the environmental issue that best illustrates his case is the elephant—"the Pachyderm as Paradigm," as he put it...
...I asked Smith...
...But as Fred Smith says, this is not an encouraging prospect, from the elephants' perspective...
...Conservationists are behaving as though they really only want to conserve a few hundred elephants...
...Not the elected government, either, but "the permanent government—the bureaucracy...
...In the decade that this policy has been in effect, the Kenyan elephant population has fallen from 65,000 to 19,000...
...256 pages, $16.95 O LOST VICTORIES Erich von Manstein Foreword by B. H. Liddell Hart 584 pages, $22.50 ^ ON STRATEGY A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War Harry G. Summers, Jr., Col...
...It engages in the terribly unfair practice of quoting people accurately, a particularly nasty thing to do to the press...
...Vieira obviously considered the latter more desirable—presumably because no fmancial transaction is involved...
...In October 1989, at the Lausanne...
...Tourism is a way of keeping a few hundred elephants alive," he said...
...William Rusher, former publisher National Review MediaWatch is invaluable and it is great fun to read...
...Can't these noble beasts, at least, be kept free from the taint of trade...
...Tell me more," I said...
...But segregation did not benefit the black race, Smith said, and it won't work for the animal kingdom, either...
...Morris's outline of America's domestic and international response to small scale nuclear attack is provocative...
...Jones says this is "very dif=ficult, if not impossible in impoverished African countries...
...many of them in the future...
...At present, environmentalists (through their domination of the commanding heights of the news media) think they can enlist government power to force into place their segregationist vision of nature separated from man...
...Who, after all, would have thought that Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Marxist, would point the way to the correct solution of the elephant problem in Africa...
...This, of course, is counter-intuitive...
...Fred Smith said the problem was thedesire of many environmentalists to segregate the animal kingdom from the world of human action, trade, and commerce...
...Publishers Weekly "Morris captures the traditional fast-pace of political thrillers by Ludlum and le Carre in this suspenseful novel...
...Poachers continue to hunt down the elephant because ivory has (by comparison with the per capita income of the average Kenyan) a very high value...
...The conclusion is riviting, the protagonist interesting, and the novel a great read...
...In Kenya, by contrast, elephants roam the unfenced, socialized terrain and the government tries to protect it from poachers by banning all commercial use of the elephant, except tourism...
...Again, it will be bad news for the elephant if the price falls much lower, because then it might no longer be in the interest of Zimbabweans, and others in the region, to set aside valuable resources to conserve the elephant (although it is possible that the high fees paid by big-game hunters will alone be sufficient...
...New York Times Book Review "The pace is fast, with the final confrontation, set atop San Antonio's Tower of the Americas, dramatic and well crafted...
...I mpoverishing the elephant, rather than enriching the country, is exactly the wrong way to go, however, for the reasons that Fred Smith gave...
...In Washington, D.C., perhaps its most articulate spokesman is Fred L. Smith, the founder and president of a small think-tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute...
...Elephant populations in the countries adopting a Zimbabwean strategy—Botswana, South Africa, Malawi, and Namibia—are increasing at a rate of five percent a year...
...of Inf...
...Therefore, he said, there's lots of profit for all and "middlemen" hire poachers who have the opportunity to earn much more money than they normally see...
...Name Address 0 Bill Me ^ Check ^ VISA 0 MC Card No...
...People get mad about dogs running through their backyards...
...Rhinos have a high price on their heads, mainly because some people believe that powdered rhino horn is an aphrodisiac: they are prepared to pay a lot of money for the substance (more than the equivalent weight of gold, in fact...
...It's like trying to stop rustling by 3 GOOD REASONS TO READ MediaWatch® 66 It is by long odds the most inspired idea that has hit the conservative movement in years.Your determined and comprehensive coverage of the media's performance has almost no competition and absolutely no equal whatever...
...Even the minority of writers and reporters intellectually equipped to go beyond the `13ambi-versus-the-Rednecks' stereotypes that characterize most coverage know that nobody can make a career doing this...
...It's because we use cows to eat that we have tens of millions of them in the United States...
...environmental imperialism has placed the elephant in jeopardy...
...I was reminded of the small group of economists and public policy analysts, and the even smaller number of journalists, who argue that the natural resources of the earth, whether they be timber or rhinos or elephants or wilderness or water or rain forests, will be better protected and more economically used, with less environmental disruption, if they are private rather than state property (or the common property of an indeterminate number of tribesmen...
...Farmers thereby gained a stake in preserving elephants, and in permitting controlled hunting by big-game hunters who (according to Jane Perlez of the New York Times) spend up to $40,000 "on their three-week jaunts in the bush...
...If for any reason you are not completely satisfied, return the book with invoice number to Presidio Press, P.O...
...your average right-thinking, college-educated, environmentally sensitive person will ask...
...In a chapter of The Yellowstone Primer, "Playing Games at Newsweek," Lyons (now afreelancer) explains why...
...Rather than see the wisdom of this, however, the U.S...
...Expiration Date Send your order to: MediaWatch Media Research Center 111 S. Columbus Street Alexandria, Virginia 22314 L Aso MEDIA ESEARCH CE R NTER 1 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 declaring that the whole world must stop eating beef...
...Whenwill these people learn that it is not enough to have good intentions...
...The Kenyans and the Americans riposte that there is one commercial use of the elephant that they will countenance: tourism...
...The electrified fence cost upward of $1 million, according to Anne Comfort of Save the Rhinos (an organization based in Washington, D.C...
...This excellent article was reprinted by the Washington Post...
...240 pages, $18.95 NUCLEAR TERRORISM THE FINAL NIGHTMARE "Fast-moving....[With] lots of down-to-the wire action...
...There he learned that the problem of putting a price on a publicly owned resource was bureaucratically insoluble...
...Operating costs, including guards, will be $100,000 a year...
...Free-market environmentalism presents your average liberal with a nice dilemma...
...848 pages, $27.50 U WITH THE OLD BREED At Peleliu and Okinawa Eugene B. Sledge 346 pages, $24.95 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 11...
...That's why it's so refreshing to see MediaWatch serving as a watchdog of the same powerful people that pride themselves on being the watchdogs of everyone else...
...So a continued legal trade in ivory will continue...
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...But . . . private property...
...If its tusks and hide are deprived of value by a trading ban, he THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 9 said, the elephant will be about as useful to the local population as a "giant rat...
...He said that a large tusk, valued at $100 a kilo, could be worth $5,000, while per capita income may be no more than $200...
...Phillip B. Davidson, USA (Ret...
...Senator Jesse Helms Every month MediaWatch will give you examples, quotes, studies and analysis exposing the liberal bias of the media, especially the TV networks...
...According to Marshall Jones, an official with the Fish and Wildlife Service of the U.S...
...Don't miss Sword of the Shaheen...
...At present the urban-sentimental, wildlife-as-welfare client view of natural resource issues is the prevailing belief of the national press," he writes...
...The analogy also conveys the messianic global-ism of American environmentalists...
...The latest information we have," Marshall Jones told me, "is that the price of ivory on the black market is less than half what it had been...
...Why is a ban on trading ivory bad for elephants...
...In fact, if poaching elephants endangers the elephant, then it is poaching that should be stopped...
...These emotions (I would not call them arguments) were illustrated in the course of a not-veryintelligent "60 Minutes" segment by Meredith Vieira, aired on January 21...
...He quotes a colleague as saying: "The Washington bureau ]of Newsweek] is full of people who, when they say 'we,' don't mean Newsweek, but the government...
...If its only remaining function is to be looked at, then we won't be needing very...
...The elephant, then, is a valuable resource in a poor country...
...Can you imagine how they feel about elephants...
...It] is breathlessly written...
...Keep it up...
...disapproves of the Zimbabwean approach because, by preserving the ivory trade intact, it encourages continued poaching in Kenya—the poached ivory then "leaking" into the legal ivory market...
...A low-grade meat source...
...In July, the president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, set fire to $3 million worth of elephants' tusks in front of TV cameras to demonstrate Kenya's "dedication to saving the elephant...
...Briefly: In recent years, two quite different approaches to saving the elephant have been followed in two areas of Africa...
...Because the elephant now reverts to a pest," he said...
...Order now...
...But because trade in ivory is illegal, poachers dominate the (black) market...
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...The U.S...
...Bravo to MediaWatch for exposing the hypocrisy in so much of what's going on among the 'news' business in our time...
...delegation at the Lausanne meeting), "the reward for a single tusk is equal to or more than the average per capita income...
...The effect of this on the media is bound to be enormous, though of course they will deny this and resist it as long as possible...
...Since adopting this policy, Zimbabwe has seen its elephant population grow from 30,000 to 43,000...
...I ncidentally, there's an interesting comment on journalistic attitudes toward these matters in a recent Pacific Research Institute book entitled The Yellowstone Primer...
...He likes the thought of rhinos and elephants preserved from poachers...
...Isn't there a more humane way...
...Since no factory manufactured natural resources, whether they be animal, mineral, or vegetable, no one should rightfully be allowed to own, let alone "profit" from them...
...To put a price on a rhino's head is not only to sully nature with greed, it is to doom the animal to end up in a sportsman's telescopic sights...
...The most important country that did not sign the ivory agreement at Lausanne was the People's Republic of China...
...Marshall Jones told me that the U.S...
...Only integration will work, and that in practice will require markets and privatization...
...But at the moment it looks as though U.S...
...We are attempting to make the elephant valueless worldwide, so that "middlemen" will no longer have an incentive to hire poachers...
...W by has the Kenyan approach failed...
...CAPITOL IDEAS THE GIANT RAT OF KENYA by Tom Bethell 0 n January 15, ABC's "World News Tonight" broadcast a news story about the African rhino, pointing out that a lady in Kenya named Anna Merz (Swiss, I believe) had fenced in a 10,000-acre ranch north of Nairobi, thereby protecting eighteen black and white rhinos from poachers...
...What she failed to consider is that the higher the price that any animal fetches, the more incentive breeders and ranchers will have to multiply them...
...for Research on Economics and the Environment, in Bozeman, Montana, have been leading exponents of this view, now sometimes called the "new resource economics...
...Army Special Forces Col...
...After much research and reporting, Lyons wrote an article sympathetic to Chase, only to see an entirely different story appear in the magazine...
...People will pay good money to photograph elephants in game reserves...
...Department of the Interior (a member of the U.S...
...Gene Lyons, formerly with Newsweek, describes his thwarted attempt in 1986 to write a Newsweek cover story on Alston Chase's book, Playing God in Yellowstone, which sets forth in detail the National Park Service's inability to manage Yellowstone National Park...
...Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the U.S...
...has attempted to solve the problem by making the elephant less valuable rather than by allowing Africans to realize the value of elephants...
...He said the whole story had recently been written up in Policy Review by Randy Simmons and Urs Kreuter, the former from Utah State University, thelatter a range scientist from Zimbabwe...
...A native of Pearl River, Louisiana, and a graduate of 111-lane University (1963), Smith is a tireless, passionate exponent of what he sometimes calls free-market environmentalism...
...This, of course, is exactly comparable to blaming cattle markets for the continued existence of cattle rustling...
...I was intrigued that anyone in Washington would dare compare an elephant to a rat...
...South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, and Malawi also did not sign...
...Later he read Von Mises and Hayek, and things began to fall into place...
...Elliott Abrams, former Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Big media, like big government, become dangerously arrogant if their power is unchecked...
...Tang R. Adm...
...Other East and Central African countries have followed the Kenyan approach: their collective elephant populations dropped from 866,000 to 404,000 between 1979 and 1989...
...Someone had thought highly enough of the rhinos to "convert" eighteen of them into private property...
Vol. 23 • March 1990 • No. 3
