Would that the Chinese rich were addicted to designer drugs instead of ivory.
“Africa is in the midst of an epic elephant slaughter,” wrote Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times on September 3. Sounds like a headline from another era, doesn’t it? Sadly, it’s not. “Conservation groups say poachers are wiping out tens of thousands of elephants a year, more than at any time in the previous two decades.” Who exactly are the poachers? Gettleman explains.
Some of Africa’s most notorious armed groups, including the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfur’s janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons and sustain their mayhem. … But it is not just outlaws cashing in. Members of some of the African armies that the American government trains and supports with millions of taxpayer dollars — like the Ugandan military, the Congolese Army and newly independent South Sudan’s military — have been implicated in poaching elephants and dealing in ivory.
The principal market, as is widely known, is China, with its confluence of “old customs and traditions with new money.” Many Chinese, of course, including one of its more affluent, see the cruelty involved. Yahoo Sports reported in August:
Retired NBA star Yao Ming is using his international renown and domestic status as one of China’s most recognizable public figures to try to convince his fellow Chinese citizens to stop seeking products made from elephant ivory and rhino horn, hoping to curb the demand that fuels poaching in Africa and is helping bring Kenyan elephants and rhinos perilously close to extinction. [He] arrived in Kenya on Friday, Aug. 10, 2012 — his first-ever visit to the African nation — to meet with local scientists and conservationists, to begin filming and to see the animals first-hand.
In the interim wouldn’t common sense dictate that to ensure a continued supply of ivory, poachers, instead of killing elephants, tranquilize elephants and just trim the ivory, which would then grow back? But they probably just assume that some other poacher will just kill the elephants and extract the whole tusk, from which elephants, even if not killed by the poachers, can’t recover.
Meanwhile elephants seem like they may actually be evolving smaller tusks in the last 150 years presumably in response to poaching. They’re thus left at a disadvantage because fully-grown tusks are critical for digging and defense, not to mention establishing social dominance. But growing smaller tusk may be further counterproductive because, conceivably, it only incites poachers to fill their quota of ivory. In any event, evolution can’t outrace poachers.
Cross-posted from the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.
Saw this at the Atlantic:
The power of the idea of ivory is immense, and shows no signs of waning. For the elephants that bare them, perhaps the only hope is that the price will go up and up, through greater regulation and greater monitoring, putting ivory once again out of reach for even the middle class. The irony of this is that the side effect of the best way to staunch the flow of ivory and the slaughter of elephants may be the reinforcement of the cultural myth: Make ivory even rarer, even more reserved for only the very few, and esteem for it will only rise.