Good Work! the animation, but especially the mission.
NOT CRYING (totally crying).
Is there such a thing as poacher poaching? Or is that just what anti-poachers do?
I’m more and more for treating the killing of animals with self-conscious-sentience as murder.
The great apes are a start but we need to go further.
Very moving, and yes, simple animation can be more selectively expressive and powerful than even video.
As for the message - that every poached animal is someone’s mother/father - it isn’t really specific to the problem of poaching, as this is also true of legally slaughtered livestock animals, like goats, cows, chickens. pigs, etc… The unique criminality of poaching isn’t the cruelty of taking a parent animal from a child, but that the killers are killing protected and endangered animals, which is a more abstract message about preserving diversity in the food chain and animal world.
It makes sense for the specific purpose of developing interest in fostering baby elephants, but the idea that the drive to do so comes out of pitying and rescuing an orphaned child elephant, rather than the over-arching goal of preserving an endangered species would be a little disingenuous to anyone other than an ethical vegetarian/vegan…
Long long ago, back in the misty depths of time I worked as a designer for the Bronx Zoo (spoiler alert, best job ever). I was privileged enough to actually touch a baby elephant: they are covered in hair, soft but thick strands. And the baby was so trusting of us humans… lil shaver was thrilled to eat the treats we brought and was eager for more. Later I was in a pen with an adult elephant and they are also still covered in (sparse) hair, but those hairs were like wire.
When an elephant dies in the wild, the members of the elephant group have been observed to come back to the site, gently touch the bones, trace the orbits of the eyes and remember. Did you know elephants cry? True. So we have something in common.
For what it’s worth, I cry over dead elephants without offspring too. It would still be awful, but more understandable, if people were killing them for food–but to slaughter them just for ivory is horrendous. Same goes for any number of other animals (e.g. shark fins for soup).
There is a shoot-to-kill policy in some African countries regarding poachers.
Is that just for the anti-poachers or is everyone allowed to? Because I can imagine some mischief if there’s no oversight or… tags or whatever they’re called.
Good grief no! You have to be part of the Government’s anti-poacher unit. If you were a private game warden you’d have a court hearing for shooting a poacher, but you’d likely be set free. As an individual citizen you’d be tried for murder.
And as it happens there’s a magazine story on the BBC news site today about UK special forces being enrolled in the local police to snipe rhino poachers.
Great article.
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