What a lot of people don't realize is that many poachers are from impoverished regions where they do not know any other way to make a living. They come from a culture built around hunting, and now they are not allowed to hunt anymore.
Saying that poachers should be treated as less than human just because they are making animals go extinct is kind of like saying that we should treat poppy farmers as less than human because the heroin their crop produces is killing our young people. I have no idea who the poachers in this case were, and obviously you have to sink pretty darned low to kill an animal raised in captivity, especially one that is near extinction. While there are plenty of poachers who are just thugs looking to profit off a vice, but there are also ones who are just desperate to keep their families fed, and do not think beyond that. The long term consequences are irrelevant to them, because all that matters to them is getting enough money to keep food on the table. Far worse things are done to animals by Chinese street vendors every single day, but since it's just dogs and cats it does not make headlines.
I think it's abhorrent that people would slaughter endangered species for money, but you can't just lump all these people into the same group and then say "if we just kill a few and that will make the problem stop." We could also drop napalm on some South American islander's poppy farm, but that's not going to make the heroin problem stop, and it does nothing to solve the issue of why they were farming poppy in the first place. Like the poppy farmers, a lot of poachers do what they do because they believe they have no alternative, and taking someone's rights away just because there are animals involved is not going to solve anyone's problems.
Niiice - That got me
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