The truth is, turkeys are not an endangered species. If they were endangered and fell under Appendix 1 of the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), their trade would be forbidden and grocery stores could not sell them. Around 17% of the world turkey production is exported (see also the data from the USDA). Why aren’t turkeys disappearing since more than 800 million of them are eaten every year in the world? To ask this question is to start understanding the misrepresentation in CITES.
The Economist used to understand the problem. The March 6, 2018 issue explained (“Trade Bans and Conservation: Call of the Wild”):
The obvious economic explanation is that the over-exploitation of animals and plants is an example of the “tragedy of the commons”. If no one owns the wildlife or the land on which it lives, the behaviour that is individually rational—poaching, clearing land and so forth—may be collective folly. Trade ban or no trade ban, without enforceable property rights, the underlying tragedy remains.
As recently as 2016, the magazine gave a glimpse at the private solutions of production and trade. Breeding rhinos was legal in South Africa but trading the ivory of their horns was not. The magazine reported:
John Hume, who owns 1,410 rhinos—more than any other private owner in the world—has five tonnes of horn stockpiled that he is not allowed to sell. He wants to be able to make money from his valuable property, and deter poachers, by cutting and selling their horns (which grow back, like hair and nails). “I breed and protect rhinos. That’s what I do. And I think that’s what we need to do to save them,” he says.
In the Economist‘s issue of August 10, 2019 (“How to Curb the Trade in Endangered Species”), however, private solutions are mostly invisible. The magazine argues for more repression of illegal trade to preserve animals like elephants, African grey parrots, etc.
CITES protects 669 species and 33 subspecies of animals from extinction, including 155 species and 8 subspecies of birds.
Why aren’t non-protected turkeys not threatened with extinction? We can estimate that more than 400,000,000 of them are alive at any time in the world. The reason they continue to be produced is that private producers can own them and sell them. Otherwise, turkeys would go the route of elephants and parrots, which only non-profit organizations have an incentive to own—but a weak incentive since they can’t make profits. If they were “protected,” turkeys would need protection against poachers in government parks. Private property and trade, two related freedoms, ensure that turkeys as a species are not threatened, because some consumers demand them and there is money to be made in satisfying that demand.
Another example: on the one hand, you can buy unprotected ducks at Whole Foods; on the other hand, the four subspecies of ducks protected by CITES always threaten to disappear.
Except for possible cases of animals wanted by literally no one, animals are not protected because they are endangered, they are endangered because they protected, that is, because they cannot be privately owned, produced, and traded in response to consumer demand.
In this area as in others, collective and political solutions are inefficient. Individual and corporate solutions based on private property and freedom of exchange need to be considered, even if lots of busybodies would lose their government jobs. Busybodies alas are not an endangered species.
READER COMMENTS
ReuvenM
Aug 28 2019 at 7:31am
I feel like this is missing the point. Species don’t solely have value from their existence. The vast majority of people who care about these issues care about ecosystems and animals in their natural environment. I’m glad that Spix’s Macaw persists in captivity rather than having gone extinct – but I would much rather that they still lived in their natural habitat.
And the problem is that in most cases poaching is simply unenforceable in wild ecosystems. There are some wild rhinos today that have 24/7 armed guards. In most cases, this is simply not affordable, or even possible in the case of mobile organisms like birds. And in many cases, captive breeding is never going to be cheaper than grabbing an animal from the wild. Not everything is as amenable to living in captivity as a turkey. Just look up the resources that have been poured into captive-breeding of cheetahs.
It would be great if someone could buy a big block of forest in say Madagascar and use it to sustainably produce endangered lizards, birds, lemurs etc. for the pet trade. But they could not practically stop poachers from coming in, and could not stop harvest on adjacent properties that are necessary for sustainable populations of these species. Basic tragedy of the commons – in most cases nobody can practically own the populations of an endangered species.
There are certainly cases where dropping CITES and improving private property could be an improvement. Rhinos are probably an example. But CITES protects many species that have characteristics making private property impossible. Many species are extraordinarily mobile – migratory birds, whales, marine fish. Others are valuable enough and reproduce slowly enough that it isn’t worth trying to maintain populations (i.e. in many cases it would be more profitable to sell everything immediately and then just invest the money). And some would be expensive enough as captive-raised specimens that people would instead just wipe them out in the wild if there was a legal trade allowing them to do so.
(an aside, but the vast majority of endangered species have no commercial value whatsoever)
Hazel Meade
Aug 28 2019 at 1:06pm
What about the possibility that private breeding of endangered animals might protect the wild ones by relieving market pressure to poach? In other words, if selling ivory from private breeding of rhinos and elephants was legal, then the price of ivory would fall making it less profitable to poach. It might also be possible to establish some sort of certification for “sustainable” ivory, so that only ivory that came from certified sustainable sources could be sold. That also would relieve pressure on wild rhinos.
ReuvenM
Aug 28 2019 at 2:18pm
Yes, this is certainly possible in some instances.
The problem is that for that to actually relieve pressure from wild populations, the cost of captive breeding needs to be lower or comparable to the cost of poaching. This seems maybe plausible for rhinos as a smaller species with a horn that regrows. Especially as the rhinos can be used as tourist attractants, for big-game hunting etc. But I would bet that for elephants, captive-raised ivory would be far more expensive than poached ivory. Unless you can credibly prevent fraud with a certification program as you describe (and I’m not sure that’s possible), I suspect legal ivory would lead to increased poaching.
You can’t raise elephants like cows. They are big, smart, slow-growing and have low fecundity. Even in times when elephants were used extensively in war, they were never captive-bred.
Also worth noting is that my impression is that, unlike rhinos, current elephant conservation programs are largely working, with local populations increasing. But I have not done any real research.
Hazel Meade
Aug 29 2019 at 2:03pm
I imagine that Elephants, due to the low fecundity might be more valuable as tourist attractions than as ivory sources. You can only cut their horns and sell them once so there is a very limited supply of elephant ivory. Better to keep the elephants alive so that many people can enjoy them. It makes sense that the government would keep them protected in a reserve. In this case, it is kind of like the government is the “owner” of the elephants, and derives profits from the tax dollars it makes from the tourism industry.Any private elephant owner would also have to worry about poaching/theft of elephant ivory, and would put in place protections.
Do you think maybe if more rhino ivory was available that might relieve pressure on elephants, or there a specific market for elephant ivory that doesn’t permit substitution?
Mark Z
Aug 30 2019 at 1:29am
It seems highly doubtful to me that legitimate ivory dealers would be able to do what you’re suggesting and systematically but cheaper poached ivory. Just the costs of having to deal with irregular, unpredictable suppliers with inconsistent quality would probably make them balk at it.
And it’d be pretty difficult to get away with consistently: ivory has DNA in it and one could just take random samples from a dealer to find out what population the ivory came from and cross reference it with dna samples from the legally cultivated heard. DNA testing of ivory has actually been recently used to trace illegal ivory back to specific poaching rings by identifying with impressive precision which elephant population and region the ivory cane from.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 28 2019 at 9:37pm
Hazel: Similarly, I suspect that the temptation to poach wild turkeys is reduced by the fact that you can go to the grocery store and buy a domesticated one. It would be further reduced if it were legal to raise and sell “wild” turkeys.
Thaomas
Aug 28 2019 at 9:32am
I dare say that rhinos could be privately owned before they were protected, but private cultivation of rhinos for horn could not compete with poached horn.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 28 2019 at 6:35pm
Thaomas: Domesticated turkey production does compete against poached wild turkeys. The fact that it is generally illegal to raise and sell wild turkeys (by state laws) is not an objection, but supports my point.
Hazel Meade
Aug 29 2019 at 2:10pm
I should mention here that I live in an area where there are wild turkeys. I don’t know why they would be considered endangered. There was a herd of 7-8 of them that wandered through my yard last year.
I don’t know why anyone would shoot a wild turkey to eat unless they were either too poor to afford to buy one (possible, but there’s not that many poor people who hunt for their own food these days), or they are some sort of meat connoisseur that specifically wants a “wild” turkey (also a small number).
Thaomas
Aug 30 2019 at 8:49am
It is possible that there is an equilibrium in which cultivated rhino horn is so cheap that it’s not worth anyone’s while to poach wild rhinos. But there was a time before rhinos were protected in which the rhino horn business might have grown up but did not, so finding that equilibrium may not be easy, certainly not so easy as simply removing the protection of wild rhinos and the attendant restrictions on the rhino horn cultivation business.
This is not to say that the current protection regime not be improved by allowing transactions in cultivated rhino horn but finding that equilibrium may not be so easy, either, as there are costs to separating the cultivated horn market (DNA testing, etc) from the poaching market.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 1 2019 at 10:27pm
It is generally wiser to trust entrepreneurship and economic freedom rather than political and bureaucratic purposes.
Phil H
Aug 28 2019 at 11:37am
It’s a bit hard to understand how this kind of claim can be made if you have a bit of historical perspective. Look at all the animals and plants that became extinct due to human action before the idea of conservation ever arose. It’s lots! As Reuven says above, it’s certainly possible that there are some cases in which ownership and hunting regimes would be more effective than today’s protection regimes. No system draws its boundaries perfectly. But to suggest in a blanket way that removing government restrictions would make all animals safer is just… ahistorical.
This is one of the many examples of the fundamental challenge to libertarianism that I’ve never seen anyone address very successfully: Before about 1900, there was much less law in most of the world. If you think law’s so bad, why wasn’t the world a much better place back then?
In this case, if conservation law is so bad, why did all those buffalos disappear when there was no conservation?
JayT
Aug 28 2019 at 1:19pm
The buffalo is a bad example, because there was a government-sponsored policy to kill as many buffalo as possible. In this case, it was the law was a major factor in the near extinction, not the lack of law.
Mark Z
Aug 30 2019 at 1:18am
Was there much less law before 1900? I don’t mean in terms of number of pages in a registrar; I mean what you could legally do. Granted, I’m thinking of Europe (because that’s where most of the history I know of happened) but there, until the modern era you needed permission from a lord (who could deny at will) to move from one village to another; you likely couldn’t legally sell your wine in the next region; or legally practice almost any craft in a town or city without belonging to the state-sanctioned guild. Even for lords, buying and selling land often required the permission of a higher lord if permitted at all. Local officials (or lords) set your prices and wages alike; etc.
I’d also add that technological improvement is a pretty big confounding variable. There were also fewer people and less carbon emissions back before 1900 when life was harder, but I’m not sure that’s a robust argument for becoming more fecund and emitting more carbon in hopes of making things better still.
Dustin
Aug 30 2019 at 7:53am
Brilliant comment. We have an entire history of evidence of mass extinction in the context of low regulation.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 1 2019 at 10:19pm
Forbidding private property and economic freedom is not what I would call “low regulation.” This is what happened in most places during most of the history of mankind.
ReuvenM
Aug 28 2019 at 2:27pm
I actually have another comment, because the turkey example is actually perfect. Domestic turkeys are quite different from the wild turkeys found across much of North America.
At one point, wild turkeys were almost entirely wiped out across large swathes of the continent due to over-hunting. There was no legal barrier for anyone to privately stop this – you could always buy land and tell people they couldn’t hunt there. But it didn’t happen.
What did work was stringent regulations on how turkeys can be hunted, in combination with reintroductions. Now, these regulations mean that there are large, sustainable turkey populations across the continent.
Turkeys are a perfect example of why this is not a simple problem that can be reduced to universal talking points, and needs to be looked at situationally. What protects domestic turkeys utterly failed with wild turkeys.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 28 2019 at 7:01pm
It would argue that it is instead a good example of why a complex problem can be illuminated by a simple theory, because that’s what simple theories are meant for. Turkeys have been domesticated close to three millennia ago. Although they have of course evolved differently, domestic turkeys have DNA similar to wild ones. See https://insider.si.edu/2012/10/todays-domestic-turkeys-are-genetically-distinct-from-wild-ancestors/; see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_turkey. On the other hand, note that it is generally forbidden to raise and sell wild turkeys: for example, see https://www.morningagclips.com/laws-are-strict-on-taking-wild-turkey-eggs-and-releasing-pen-raised-turkeys/ and https://www.morningagclips.com/laws-are-strict-on-taking-wild-turkey-eggs-and-releasing-pen-raised-turkeys/.
Thaomas
Aug 30 2019 at 8:56am
Indeed simple theories do “illuminate” complex situations, but that does not mean that the best policy is the implementation of the simple theory.
Hazel Meade
Aug 29 2019 at 2:41pm
I’m not sure why regulations against killing wild turkeys needs to be coupled with bans on raising and selling “wild” turkeys. It would be fairly hard to convince a conventional grocery store to buy a poached wild turkey these days, so I don’t see how there would be much of an illegal trade in poached turkeys.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 1 2019 at 10:25pm
Hazel: There is no regulation against hunting wild turkeys in the proper hunting seasons. The prohibition is against selling it (or, I understand, raising it for commercial purposes). These are state laws. I don’t think that the wild turkey is protected at the federal level.
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