I do take that stance most of the time. Do we cheer for the deaths of coltan miners in the DRC when their informal mines collapse and kill them because it’s a net gain for the environment? Do we cheer for the summary execution of people in the imperial core (and especially the burgerreich) for stealing bread, or robbing banks, or whatever? The systems that make poaching economically viable are the actual problem. A dead poacher only means a dead elephant and a grieving family and does nothing to address the real, lingering material conditions that are a direct result of apartheid South African wildlife conservation efforts (wildlife conservation efforts themselves have the irredeemable stink of white supremacy on them but that is another post entirely) that lead to deaths like this. Deaths like this do not happen in African countries where elephants live near people that don’t have a history of apartheid. You cannot separate the two and actual white supremacists are happy to cheer on the murder of the poorest, most desperate racialized people in the world in order to save charismatic megafauna.

Come back when you’re ready to depopulate and turn the Tennessee River Valley into a fenced off, guarded nature reserve for the snail darter, to be policed by USAmerican law enforcement and whatever predators happen to repopulate the area.

This deserves a bigger effortpost than I’m able to give right now. I understand that “wildlife preservation is white supremacist, a tool of settler-colonialism, and of USAmerican soft power overseas that has resulted in the enclosure of indigenous land and death of thousands of people for the primary benefit of charismatic megafauna and the imperial core tourists who pay to see them, to the detriment of people who were already managing the environment and the environment both” is not a common argument to hear, at least in the imperial core, but it is the historical and material reality of it.

Those elephants, those rhinos, that you say have a right to defend themselves from poachers, have their populations culled regularly by technocratic, white, resource managers. That’s how ZA National Parks operate. That’s how most National Parks operate. We don’t hear about them killing rhinos or elephants from helicopters. They get death threats for doing it but if they don’t there are grave environmental consequences for other species.

And I am completely serious about Boer elephants. The elephants are in the Boer park gleefully trampling dispossessed black South Africans because of the planning that was done under apartheid and that continues today. You do not see this happening in Tanzania, say, because they never had an apartheid regime there (you do have wildlife conservationists calling for the eradication or further dispossession of Masai people for “trespassing” on their own land, where elephants live, because we as people who do not live with elephants or rhinos value the lives of animals more than we value the lives of living, breathing, racialized human beings.

And lastly, the poachers aren’t the ones doing “all of the violence”. This is one man, who we learn nothing about from the article in a British tabloid that this story is sourced from, whose actions are ultimately inconsequential, who has no way to cull a rhino through the accepted channels. And if you actually want to stop poaching, the way you do it without killing human beings (who again, even the racialized ones, do mourn their dead in elaborate rituals similar to those of the elephants we grant moral standing we do not grant to other human beings) is to address the material conditions that lead to the kind of poaching that occurs in ZA.

You have to look at the historical context, or you will find yourself cheering for the death of desperate people who would garner sympathy, who should garner sympathy, and not have their lives dismissed as disposable, as less than human, as less than animal, even, as they have been for centuries. Which winds up upholding white supremacy and doing nothing to help elephants, rhinos, poachers, or anyone. This happens over and over again.