The point of producing them on a ranch is to make poaching uneconomical while at the same time producing enough for the market while remaining economically viable. Poachers, on the other hand, will hunt the species down to extinction, that's their incentive.
How does it achieve that goal tho? The price of raising an elephant on a farm is quite a bit and it takes forever. The price for a poacher is essentially zero.
The price for a poacher is not zero. They risk life, limb and prison (not that I feel sorry for them) but it's not risk free.
Yeah, I remain unconvinced based on this.
> The price for a poacher is not zero.
The price of life in these areas is effectively zero. It's not the higher ups who do the killing, they get some locals to do it.
You can also try to breed faster growing critters. (That's a very long term project, though.)
Prevent wild elephants from going extinct.
> Are we trying to prevent suffering of an intelligent species or what?
No. If that were humanity's goal, we would have stopped eating pork.
humans aren't raising pigs to prevent their extinction tho.
> No. If that were humanity's goal, we would have stopped eating pork.
The tides are slowly turning but we shouldn't be enslaving yet another species.
We don't need to hunt wild boar for meat thanks to factory farming of pork. Tracking a boar in the woods just for its meat makes no economic sense. We hunt the boar mainly for the experience of killing a dangerous and intelligent animal. But selling experience is hard to scale, esp. because only a very small subset of humanity has been allowed to engage in that sort of hunt (formerly by legally enforced social class distinctions and land ownership, more recently by cultural norms).
As a result, the hunting of boar is kept to a sustainable level.
As for the elephant, we don't need the meat either. And if hunting were only for the trophy hunter's experience, it would be sustainable. But the problem is the ivory: plastic is not a good enough substitute, so prices for the real thing are astronomical, and industrial-scale poaching of wild elephants makes economic sense for the unscrupulous.
If we farm-raise enough elephants to drop the price of ivory to the point that poachers could gain more from other illegal pursuits - illegal mining, stealing non-ferrous metals from construction sites, tapping into oil pipelines etc. - we would save the wild elephant.
Also its not really viable. It takes forever to grow tusks (think decades).
And you are right, fundamentally this would just lead to extinction of elephants in the wild, because poachers would kill them.
But let's take a step back and realize that we really don't need to be enslaving another species.