Animal Poaching; The Difference Between Us and Them

In my last Slate Post, I talked about the interview with a former hunter Matthew Ossowski. This time, I went bigger. The last post was all about poaching. I did even more research and learned new things about poaching. Most of this information is local. I surveyed 58 people, and these were my results.

For this post, I was wondering how much people actually know about poaching and how they would answer. I got my results by making the survey. These results helped my research because I saw poaching through other people’s eyes.  What people don’t know is the poachers feel. I found a website that interviewed an actual elephant poacher about his experiences. This is what I found:

The poacher (I will call him “the poacher” because I don’t want to intrude privacy) said that he only went hunting at night. He said that he did it for money for his family. He also said that he felt inhuman, like he didn’t want to but felt like he had to, so he did. He said that his family didn’t know he did this, that could never know. The only thing they knew was that he had a job, he then went home like nothing happened and was a normal father. The jail life changed him. He wasn’t allowed to go outside. They said he had done the worst crime than anyone else in there.

After he got out, he knew things had to change. When he did get out, he went straight to the wildlife authorities to get a job. The interviewer asked about what he would do to stop the elephants from being poached, he had the same idea that I did, to teach people the importance of the animals that are being poached.

Now that I have seen through the eyes of a poacher, I see why he did it. Although it was a bad choice and there were other options, I understand why he did it, not saying that I would do it, because I wouldn’t. However, my opinion has changed a little. Like Mr. Ossowski said in my last slate post, “ however if you're doing it to feed your family because you're poor, you know legally yeah it's wrong, if you're just doing it to eat, okay. But if you're doing it just to kill something or make money or something. I don't agree with that.”. This poacher was doing just that, making money for his family, any money he made would go straight to his six kids and wife.

Although I have done all this research over the course of this project, I am still wondering how cold hearted people have to be to actually start poaching. Unlike the poacher I wrote about who acted upon family, some people do it for other reasons such as to sell them to companies, some people work for the companies and people make them into jewelry.

For my “Agent of Change” portion of my project, I will set up a group to talk about the subjects of animal poaching, and the importance of just some of the animals that are being poached. Or I will make website so everyone can see it, and talk about the topics I mentioned.

If you want more information on these websites, please visit me Annotated Bibliography.