ORGANIZED CRIMES AGAINST NATURE: ELEPHANTS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Poaching of elephants in Southern Africa is now dominated by international groups following a model of organized crime. This shift, from poaching conducted by small, local groups; with limited mobility, weapons, and technology, to individuals who organize, finance, equip, and transport well‐armed poaching units to previously scouted locations, has made the protection of elephants in Southern Africa much more difficult and dangerous. This paper develops a model of high‐tech criminal poaching. A poaching organization makes a decision on the number of “planned poaching expeditions.” If a poaching unit is intercepted the entire organization is destroyed, but is replaced by a new organization in the next year. The operating life of a poaching organization is a stochastic process, which in turn induces a stochastic evolution in the elephant population. Under plausible conditions, the number of planned poaching expeditions is highly sensitive to the probability of interception by anti‐poaching patrols, but is nonresponsive to reductions in the black‐market ivory price. Thereby it might be better to focus conservation efforts on increasing the probability of intercepting poaching units rather than trying to control black market ivory prices. A benchmark value of poaching expeditions is identified—above which elephants may slowly decline to extinction.