One way to stop poaching of rare animals

Shoot the poachers.  Outside explains how one national park in India has protected its tigers and rhinos:

Pegu was ready. He came upon a mother rhino feeding with her calf. Got out his rifle. Shooting a rhino is like shooting a barn: when you take aim, they stop and stare, deciding whether to charge. Pegu shot the mother dead, hacked off her horn, and left the baby standing there...

As soon as he fired, [park rangers] closed on the spot. Unlike most guards in most parks in India, they were armed. And they had license to kill.

Pegu saw the guards first and opened fire. Missed. The guards took cover. As the shooting continued, one guard calmly raised his antique .303 Lee Enfield rifle to his shoulder, lined up Pegu in his sights, and blew his head off.

Pegu’s accomplice was shot in the hip by another guard. An hour later, he, too, had died “from his injuries,” according to the park’s report...

I try to envision a ranger in the U.S. ­doing the same. But nothing in Kaziranga is like anything in the U.S. There’s the super­dense concentration of tigers, rhinos, and ­ele­phants—and the fact that they’re thriving. The sheer value of that wildlife on the black market. The grinding poverty of the ­surrounding ­villages. And the tsunami of money and ­demand pouring out of China...

Kaziranga has about 100 of Asia’s remaining 2,000 Bengal ­tigers, the highest density of any park in the world. Its tiger population continues to ­increase—in sharp contrast to the rest of ­India, where poaching has reduced ­Bengal ­tiger numbers from 3,600 in the 1990s to about 1,700 today. In China, a ­tiger skin can fetch $20,000, and a large rhino horn will set you back about $37,000...

The guards receive a tiny stipend, a camp to live in, a uniform, a gun, and a few bullets. That’s it. They have to provide their own food and communication device. They have no way of leaving their camps unless they radio for a jeep pickup—not a big problem, since they rarely get a day off to see their families anyway. The chronically strapped Forest Depart­ment sometimes goes months without paying them; it hasn’t had the money to hire new guards in 20 years, so there are a hundred unfilled ­positions, and the existing guards are stretched too thin...

Shooting poachers? A no-brainer. Accord­ing to Unesco, nine to twelve poachers are shot in Kaziranga each year, and 50 were killed in the nineties alone. Has it worked? Since the peak in 1992, when 48 rhinos were poached, the past decade has averaged fewer than ten poachings per year. In 2010, only five rhinos were shot in Kaziranga, while nine poachers were killed, the first time poacher deaths surpassed rhinos...

Much more at the long link about this very complicated environmental and social issue.

Via Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Addendum: The Sydney Morning Herald reports that another park in India is employing similar tactics - this time with armed commandos rather than impoverished park rangers:

Armed commandos are to be deployed in the jungles of southern India to deter poachers from capturing and killing endangered tigers. The 54-strong Special Tiger Protection Force will patrol the two main tiger reserves of Bandipur and Nagarhole national parks on the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu state border...