Why not? I often see people draw this distinction between humanity and nature, as if we weren't part of nature, and there is something deeply misanthropic about it. Of course we are part of nature. We may be screwing over the habitat of other animals -- like rabbits in Australia or pythons in the everglades -- but we are certainly part of nature and this is a textbook case of natural selection at work.

That is exactly what the distinction "natural / artificial" means... it's not some kind of judgment. In this sense of the word, artificial just means "by humans".

"artificial selection" means people selectively breeding for traits they find desirable [0] [1]. e.g. "I want a short-legged dog, so I'm going to keep breeding the shortest-legged dog from each generation together." That's not what's happening here. The poachers aren't trying to create tuskless elephants.

You can't peel off the "natural" in "natural selection" in this case and say "because this is done by humans, it's artificial selection," when artificial selection already has a distinct meaning.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding [1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/artificial-s...

That is also an incoherent distinction. If humans ferment milk to make cheese, then this is "artificial" food? No, I think people use "natural" and "artificial" to mean "traditional practice" versus "modern practice", but humans do all of it.

Yes, it turns out that the English language is full of incoherent distinctions. Words mean radically different things in different contexts, have definitions that are not really self-consistent, and tons of exceptions that we have to memorize. And yet, we must make sense of it to navigate.

If I were a philosopher, or if I wrote dictionary entries, I might decide to spend the time to come up with a rather clever definition for "artificial". Feel free to come up with a definition yourself, if that's your fancy.

I think the underlying bugaboo is "untested", particularly when referring to something considered "fragile".

People trust traditional techniques of preparing food because they have proven successful at their intended goals. When you start messing with people's food, they become suspicious as to whether you know the full repercussions of what you are doing.

So the injection of a novel element is considered "artificial" - despoiling the "natural" -- e.g. time-tested technique, and possibly disturbing something fragile -- e.g. human health.

Similarly, people are quite reactionary when it comes to open spaces and nature because they see a system that appears to be in balance and has survived the test of time. They oppose altering the current state of affairs because they are sure some unintended side effect will screw things up.

On the one hand, it's laudable to have these goals, but if they used the standard language of conservatism, traditionalism, etc, they would be branded as reactionaries, so the spirit of the age is to invent new words like "artificial" and "natural" that are less loaded with politics, even though it is all just conservatism at its roots.

Humans are animals and predators like any other in this situation.

Why downvote parent? A human is a "natural" predator just with different methods of attack/more intelligence than "animals". Why is a human predator (an "apex predator" if you will) any less "natural" than a T-Rex? Or any other animal that forced evolutionary change?

Because of civilization. While the word "artificial" is certainly overloaded, this is basically what we've designated the word to mean. That's not to say a human couldn't be a "natural" predator, if you assumed an isolated tribe, but that's certainly not what's happening here. If we call this natural, there is no longer any meaning you can ascribe to artificial.