Tanzania is reportedly experiencing a major poaching problem, and some of its leaders are going positively Texan in dealing with it. Minister of Natural Resources and Tourism Khamis Kagasheki noted recently that Tanzania may have lost half its elephant population within the past three years, and then essentially advocated a “shoot to kill” policy:

Soft measures, which we witness today, especially with sentencing for those caught poaching, will not deter poachers…Our own teams in Kenya can arrest a poacher one day and then the next week come up against the same poacher, who having paid a small fine was released by the courts – where’s the deterrent?…I am very aware that some alleged human rights activists will make an uproar, claiming that poachers have as much rights to be tried in courts as the next person, but let’s face it, poachers not only kill wildlife but also usually never hesitate to shoot dead any innocent person standing in their way.

That was Friday, October 4, 2013. After only two months, the Tanzanian parliament has reportedly suspended the program, ominously titled Operation Terminate. During that time, police arrested more than 950 poachers and seized around 230 pounds of ivory, also described as 706 elephant tusks. Allegations abound that police are engaging in widespread human rights abuses, including the torture and killing of suspected poachers. Also, they are allegedly conducting illegal seizures of property, which is bad but sort of pales next to the alleged torture & death part.

As Salon writer Lindsay Abrams says of Mr. Kagasheki, though, “he might just have a point.” The Guardian reports that, during the past ten years, over 1,000 park rangers throughout Africa have been killed protecting wildlife, and that poachers kill one elephant every fifteen minutes for their tusks. Obviously, someone is buying these elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns, etc., and efforts should go into finding and prosecuting them as well. Something has to be done…

I don’t have any good answers for this issue, so all I can offer is inappropriate humor. Last year, a man was killed at a cockfight in California. The cause of death was an injury to his calf where a rooster armed with a knife stabbed him. Obviously, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, and other African megafauna are already pretty well-equipped with their own weapons, but no one ever expects the fowl. We need to start arming the guineafowl.

Photo credits: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Facebook (The making of this document was supported by Wikimedia CH.) (Own work) [GFDL 1.2], via Wikimedia Commons; Hans Hillewaert (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.