Farmers, Elephants, and Bees

Re:Farmers, Elephants, and Bees by grimtrigger on Friday May 10, 2013 @12:05PM (#5686944)

I have to wonder, why are these kind of solutions driven by outside players instead of local communities? Is there some kind of informational advantage the locals don't have? Elephants scares bees seems so simple that I'm not sure why locals weren't already doing it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Farmers, Elephants, and Bees by icegreentea on Friday May 10, 2013 @12:13PM (#5687005)

Firstly, there are all sorts of biases involved. We're far more likely to hear about situations like these, than native development of solutions.

Secondly, there is a non-trivial cost to thinking up ideas and experimenting. Beyond costing time and resources that the farmers may not have/may not want to spend, experimenting as a whole is pretty risking. Being an outside player with far greater ability to take on risk has an obvious advantage.

Thirdly, while the farmers probably don't want to fight elephants, in the scheme of things, they probably individually rate the well being of elephants lower than their survival. We on the other hand probably rate the importance of the two far more equally, and thus have a greater incentive to solve the problem in such a way.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Farmers, Elephants, and Bees by DanBC on Friday May 10, 2013 @12:55PM (#5687296)

Lots of ideas seem really simple with the benefit of hindsight.

Here's an idea that took someone 30 years to come up with.

(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94996/GLOBAL-Follow-the-fizz-...)

But it's really obvious! Why wasn't anyone doing this before?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Farmers, Elephants, and Bees by notahacker on Friday May 10, 2013 @04:44PM (#5688574)

This is brilliant. Why aren't the likes of Coca Cola doing it on a wider scale?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Farmers, Elephants, and Bees by randomafrican on Saturday May 11, 2013 @01:55AM (#5689827)

Incentives.

For many locals, just shooting the elephants would be the solution. Outsiders care about the elephants and the humans (most of the times, in that order).

[ Parent | on HN ]