Wild Animals provide so many benefits they should be paid

The Nepal High Court Ordered Deferral for Wildlife Parts, a Footprint of Environmental Law in a Remote Livestry?

Getting results from the court system was a difficult process. I was aware of people who waited decades for a decision. But I had no other options. My case received significant attention from both lawyers and the public, because one of the judges who was supposed to listen to it owned wildlife parts.

The government acknowledged the failure to keep records of wildlife-part ownership. The court directed the government to take a proper accounting of who possessed such parts, including evidence for those in legal possession. It ordered the seizure of illegally owned parts.

When I started my master’s programme at the School of Environmental Science and Management in Kathmandu in 2012, I was already advocating for wildlife through public forums, writing newspaper opinion pieces and organizing outreach events. For my thesis, I connected all of these experiences to the smuggling cases in my home town, to explore the illegal trade route.

My case went through 14 deferrals over five years. The Supreme Court heard my case last May. I claimed in my petition that the government didn’t keep a record of who owned what and that the government was doing the right thing. The court asked the government to provide written answers to the validity of my claim.

I had a lot of evidence after being following up for nearly two years. I found an environmental lawyer — Padam Bahadur Shrestha, based in Kathmandu — who helped me to refine the petition and file it with the Nepal Supreme Court.

I went to social media to ask for answers from enforcement agencies. I learnt that Nepal’s law clearly states that possession of wildlife parts without a registered licence is as illegal as trading protected animals. The law required any person possessing any protected wildlife parts to register them with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation. Surprisingly, when I checked in 2016, not a single person had done so.

It was difficult reaching out to traders involved in an illegal business. I opted to visit prisons and talk with people serving sentences for wildlife poaching. I had a lot of questions: who were these people? Where do they come from? Most of the people hailed from remote communities lacked basic education, as I realized later. Many of them underestimated the social cost that their imprisonment would have on their families.

“Do you think any proportion of what you pay for your [electricity] goes to protect the elephants and the gorillas in the Congo Basin planting the trees that fill the hydro schemes in Scotland?” he says. “Not a penny. Every single one of us gets a benefit from that service, even though it isn’t valued.

He explains that people who live in the developing world don’t get to see many of the documentary made there because national TV stations can’t afford to buy them. “We should make people care about the wildlife in the countries where the wildlife lives.”

And we should pay animals like elephants for their essential arboreal gardening, he argues. Elephants, birds, and apes are seed-dispersals in tropical forests. They deposit seeds in their droppings miles away.

This has a huge benefit, because trees do more than just store carbon. In a study, it was discovered that the wood in the forest where elephants still live is 14 percent greater than the one where they have died out. Rain is produced in Europe and Britain by weather systems that come from that basin.

An elephant can provide a world worth around 1.75 million dollars per animal according to a calculation by the assistant director of the International Monetary Fund. “That’s roughly $30,000 a year, or $80 a day if the elephant were being paid for the service it’s providing the world,” he pointed out. No one is paying that.