Here's a Bad Idea: Destroy Rare Hides to Save Animals

Next week, I will graduate from college so it was nice to feel today that my very expensive college education has made me smarter: this article showed me that common sense is, indeed, not so common. In Kashmir, to crack down on poaching, law enforcement experts have decided to compensate merchants for a large quantity of rare and illegal furs and destroy them. I can see how someone would thik this was an efective--or more likely a 'fair'--policy, but this plan of action will do nothing but further endanger endangered species. Here is why: demand curves are downward sloping. As you reduce the quantity of a good, all else equal it's market value will increase. When you burn tiger hides, a tiger hides become more valuable. Unfortunately, jaguar hides only come from one place: dead tigers. The more hides they burn, the more money is in killing tigers.

I'm thinking about ways that this might reduce poaching, and I can think of a few. By introducing uncertainty in the lives of merchants, the governemnt could make selling illicit furs a riskier occupation (though they aren't even hurting the people who sell these furs! They are PURCHASING them).

If this was a way of changing peoples' preferences for rare furs, then it might have meaningful, positive long-term implications but I don't think that will happen or that this is their intention. I don't know why does buy tiger furs ( I would love to know!), but I don't imagine they will feel very differently about tiger furs after they have been destroyed. If anything, they may become more of a 'status symbol' as they will certainly cost more.

In a rigorous economic model, there are two ways to reduce the number of tigers being slain for fur: reduce either supply of demand. Someone will ask, why doesn't burning hides reduce the supply? Becuase supply and quantity are not the same thing. A supply curve describes how many hides can be supplied at any given price. Burning hides does not change that. To reduce the supply one would have to make it harder or more expensive to poach or trade poached furs.

Why does criminalization reduce supply? Poaching is different from hunting only in that it is illegal. Being illegal means that there is a risk associated with working as a poacher, traficker, of trader of an illegal hide. Just as people who wash the windows of skyscrapers are paid more than people who wash the windows of flats, people who hunt illegally are paid more than people who hunt legally (even ignoring the fact that you'd have to pay me a lot to hunt a TIGER). This works like a tax: you have to pay people more, so it costs more to produce a poached fur. That cost gets passed on to consumers, and a smaller quantity will sell.

I wonder if the criminilization of hunting tigers makes tiger fur expensive or if the criminalization is so ineffective that the sheer scarcity of tigers makes them expensive. I would guess the latter, but if you wanted to be sure one would look at the decline in the tiger population over time and how much harder it has become to catch a tiger. The problem with this research method remains: endangered status is not exogenous, it is determined by how many species have been killed. You could compare the wages of poachers in India versus in Myanmar or Buthan or someplace that has better or worse law-enforcement. This would be a very interesting paper and I'm quite sure someone with the right data could publish a great paper!

Laws can also reduce demand for an illegal good. I suppose when someone purchases a tiger fur, they want to display it (??). If laws make it more difficult to display my fur, and I can only enjoy it privately, it may be worth less too me. I am not willing to pay as much. By the same token, if I risk spending five years in an Afghan prison for my ownership of a tiger hide, I'm likely to settle for a nice rug. Unfortunately, I suspect the punishment is usually both unlikely and trivial to the offender: a fine (or bribe) at worst.