Blog

It is often sugested that “all” that needs to be done to solve elephant and other poaching problems  is to reduce the demand. There is one problem there – or rather 7 billion problems.

For example, in China if you somehow managed to convince 99.9% of the population not to buy ivory – an impossible task, but just say you could – that 0.1% that remained unconvinced represents 1.3 million people still wanting to buy ivory.

Using persuasion to change people’s views on the consumptive use of wildlife is important. You can shift the mean of the distribution of human behavior in a favorable direction. But with the enoumous human population there are still huge numbers in the fat tails of the distribution whose desire for animal parts exceed the total number of individuals remaining in many species.