If You Can't Grow Opium Tattoo Elephants Instead

My previous blog entry got me thinking.  This does happen occasionally and usually at inconvenient times.  Either that or the subject of my ruminations bears absolutely no connection to the subject currently under discussion.  This can be embarrassing, particularly at work.
"What's your opinion Neil?" my supervisor will ask leaving me in the awkward position of either making something up or having to admit that I was using work time to try and come up with a method for fitting elephants with false tusks so that poachers don't have to kill them to get the ivory.

Of course the previous example is ridiculous and fanciful.  My supervisor never asks for my opinion.  Nevertheless it serves to emphasize my point which is that with a little creativity we can often exploit our natural resources without having to deplete them too much.  Not all the time of course, no amount of creativity is going to result in us coming up with a way of extracting seafood from the ocean that doesn't result in a bunch of dead fish, but sometimes.  I think the common term is sustainability although I prefer pachyderm othordonty.  I can't think of a better form of employment for most environmentalists than running around darkest Africa trying to stick false teeth on elephants.

Once the false tusks are in place we can move on to elephant body piercing and elephant tattooing.  Pretty soon we're going to have some of the wildest looking elephants imaginable.  People come to Africa to see the animals now, wait until they see the new improved versions.  Once the elephants are sorted we can extend this to other animals and pretty soon the poachers are going to be driven out of business as all the locals get better jobs in the animal body art industry.

This is the way to beat poachers of course, ultimately the local population don't get jobs as poachers out of some visceral hatred for the elephant community.  They do it to put food on the table.  Employment opportunities in the African savannah aren't so plentiful that the inhabitants can afford to pass up a lucrative career whacking elephants in the hope that something better comes along.  Normally the impoverished citizens of desperately poor parts of the globe can at least rely on growing some illicit narcotic to keep the wolf (or lion or crocodile) from the door but with sub saharan Africa its elephants or its nothing.  At least until one of our major banks outsources its data security services to the Central African Republic.  Which to be fair will probably happen any day now.