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Sunday, August 2, 2015

Day 395- Can A Lion Save the Elephants?

In 2013, Time Magazine reports that 49 lions were killed due to illegal poaching.

But stop and think.  

In 2014, 100,000 elephants were slaughtered by poachers, and 1,000 rangers were murdered in attempt to protect the elephants, according to National Geographic.  

Although Cecil was a majestic creature butchered in an unsavory and vulgar fashion, the slaughter of elephants (and humans) and the subsequent criminal activity surrounding blood ivory that fuels crime and terrorism... is certainly no less appalling.  

Cecil the Lion


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Thursday, February 26, 2015

Day 394- U.S. Government Steps In to End Ivory Trade

The following New York Times article written by Ron Nixon, captures the new policies of the U.S. government regarding illegal wildlife trade.  As the populations of elephants and rhinos decrease more and more each year, the importance of government involvement is crucial.  The Obama administration’s goals include raising fines, creating more awareness of poaching, and diminishing the demand for illegal products in the United States.





WASHINGTON — Hoping to stem illegal wildlife trafficking, the Obama administration on Wednesday introduced an aggressive plan for taking on traffickers that will include using American intelligence agencies to track and target those who benefit from the estimated $20-billion-a-year market.
The plan, which was outlined by officials from the State Department, Justice Department and Interior Department, will also increase pressure on Asian countries to stop the buying and selling of illegal rhinoceros horns, elephant ivory and other items, which President Obama has called an “international crisis,” and will try to reduce demand for those items worldwide.
“Right now, wildlife trafficking is a very profitable enterprise,” said John C. Cruden, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “Our goal is to take the profit out of this illegal trade with all the tools at our disposal.”
But the planned actions, a result of a two-year administration review on how to limit wildlife trafficking, will be supported by only a modest increase in funding and staffing for the law enforcement arm of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency chiefly responsible for policing the wildlife trade.
Anti-trafficking experts praised the effort as an important step, even as they said the government faced a daunting task.
“It’s fantastic that we are doing this, but given that there are still limited resources, the government needs to really focus its efforts and go after the criminal organizations behind the trade in the most critical areas both here and abroad,” said Crawford Allan, a wildlife trafficking expert with Traffic, a program of the World Wildlife Fund. “They can’t have a scattershot approach where they put a little money here and a little there.”
The action comes as the United States has grown into the second-largest market for illegal wildlife products and a major conduit of the products to Asia, where rhino horns and ivory are believed to cure ailments like headaches and hangovers. Officials say that millions of pounds of illegal animal products, including bear and fish bladders, are sold every year to American and foreign customers. The trade has driven several animal species to near extinction while fueling the growth of international criminal gangs.
“The ongoing slaughter of rhinos and elephants in Africa is driven by rising consumer demand here, and United States citizens are intimately involved in illegal trade both here and abroad,” said Daniel M. Ashe, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
As part of the administration’s effort, the wildlife service is for the first time sending officers abroad to help combat trafficking originating in Africa, Asia and South America. One officer has been posted to Thailand, and three will be sent to Tanzania, Botswana and Peru later this year. In its most recent budget request, the administration asked for $75.4 million a year for the wildlife service’s law enforcement division, $8 million more than the year before.
About $4 million of the funding would be used to support efforts to stop wildlife trafficking in African countries, and another $4 million to expand forensic labs and add special agents.
But even with the increase, wildlife service officials say that the staffing remains inadequate and that investigations have fallen from more than 13,000 in 2012 to about 10,000 last year.
The service has 205 investigators and an additional 120 officers who patrol nearly 40 ports of entry, examining more than 180,000 wildlife products last year.
“We have the same number of officers we had in the 1970s, when the trade was nowhere like it is now,” said Edward Grace, deputy director of law enforcement at the wildlife service. “We try to go after the big smugglers, but a lot falls through the cracks.”
Since 2012, records show that American law enforcement officials have arrested 26 people and prosecuted 18 for trading in rhino horns and ivory as part of Operation Crash, a nationwide criminal investigation into the black market for wildlife.
In addition, officials have smashed smuggling rings trading in gall bladders and paws from black bears and the totoaba, a fish in Mexico that has been pushed to the brink of extinction because of illegal trafficking. A totoaba bladder can fetch up to $20,000 in Asian countries, where it is prized in soups.
Court records and other documents show that the smuggling rings are made up of Chinese and Japanese traders; people with links to Mexican and South American drug cartels; Irish gangsters; American auction and antique dealers; and South African safari operators.
Most traffickers have little to fear, law enforcement officials said, because only an estimated 10 percent are caught. Law enforcement agencies often lack the resources to fully police the illegal trade. Also, fines for trafficking are low, and loopholes in the law still allow trade in some items, like ivory.
The shadowy wildlife trade takes place in auction houses and antique stores across the country, self-storage facilities in places like Chelsea and the Bronx in New York, and on the Internet, officials said. Smugglers bring in the items mainly through ports in New York and Los Angeles.
Stopping the ivory trade has proved to be especially problematic, officials said.
Under American law, ivory can be sold if it is more than a century old. But an investigation of vendors in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas last year by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization, found that 77 percent to 90 percent of the ivory sold by vendors in the two cities might be illegal under federal law.
While many vendors tried to pass the ivory off as 100-year-old pieces, investigators said many of the pieces appeared to have been chemically aged or physically damaged to look older.
“These fake antiques are a growing problem,” said Daniel Stiles, a wildlife investigator based in Kenya, adding that many of the pieces came from factories in China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, where raw ivory taken from poached elephants is carved into statues and altered to look older.
Trafficking in wildlife has decimated elephant and rhino populations in Africa. The latest figures from South Africa show that 1,215 rhinos were killed last year, up from a little more than 300 in 2010.
More than 100,000 elephants have been killed for ivory since 2010, according to a 2014 Colorado State University report. Rhino horns can fetch prices as high as $30,000 a pound, and ivory can command prices as high as $3,000 a pound.
Congress is also trying to address wildlife smuggling. Last month, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, introduced a bill that would increase fines for trafficking in wildlife and allow law enforcement officials to confiscate the assets of traffickers.
“The problem with these wildlife crimes is that the penalties are too low,” Ms. Feinstein said. “They aren’t much of a deterrent. We want to change that.” The bill is pending.
~Ron Nixon
February 11, 2015
The New York Times

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Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Day 393- Elephants and September 11


By protecting the elephants in Mali, we are taking money out of the hands of the same terrorist organization that attacked the United States on September 11, Al-Qaida. 
It's deplorable to think that elephants' lives are fueling radical extremism in 2015.  
~~~
“When an elephant walks out of the desert, rain is coming.” Farmers in northern Mali have sworn by their sightings of rare Gourma elephants for generations. Now for the first time, in the wake of the rebel war in Mail, poachers threaten the survival of some of the last desert elephants.
Nineteen elephants have been killed over the past month, and conservationists blame disaffected jihadis and other rebels linked to cross-Sahara smuggling rings.
It is believed there are only 350 to 500 elephants left in Mali, and those that remain are under growing threat not only from humans seeking their ivory but also from climate change and reduced rainfall, say conservationists. Their home in Gourma is located in a part of Mali that is not under complete government control, and where al-Qaida and other extremists have been active.
Nomba Ganamé, the Malian representative of the Wild Foundation, a US-based conservation charity, said the killings in the past five weeks marked the first example of large-scale poaching in Mali.
“In 2012 many young men took up arms, drawn in by high salaries offered by al-Qaida and others,” he said. “Now that those fighters find that they are shunned by their communities and are unable to return to their villages, they go into organised crime.”
At a parliamentary briefing on Tuesday in the capital, Bamako, a member of the Malian government’s nature conservation unit called on MPs to send in military reinforcements.
“In the Gourma zone there is total insecurity,” said Colonel Soumana Timbo. “We have only 10 rangers, with a few vehicles and motorbikes, covering 32,000 sq km. We need joint patrols – military and rangers – to stop this massacre.”
The Wild Foundation has worked in the Gourma region since 2002, studying elephant behaviour and taking steps to protect the animals’ unique 600km annual circular migratory route.
Ganamé said: “These are the northernmost elephants in Africa. We estimate that there are between 350 and 500 of them, the count has not been done yet. No other herd on the continent has developed a migratory pattern like theirs, allowing their survival in an environment with little water and sparse vegetation. In the climatic context of the Gourma the elephants are important for the ecology. They disseminate plant seeds across a vast area.”
Mali was the scene of a French military intervention in January 2013 after al-Qaida and other extremist groups grafted themselves on to a rebellion by Tuareg rebels demanding an independent state in the north. French operations against al-Qaida are still continuing in Mali and a 10,000-strong UN stabilisation force, Minusma, is securing cities such as Timbuktu and Gao.
But there has been little progress in settling Tuareg demands at peace talks that began in Algiers last summer. Al-Qaida has continued its attacks, causing the deaths of nearly 40 UN peacekeepers since Minusma came into being in July 2013.
In a sign of the low level of belief in a peaceful settlement, fighting has intensified in the past few weeks between loyalist militias and Arab and Tuareg rebels. The battles centre on strategic Malian staging points along the Sahara smuggling routes that are used to move arms, drugs, fuel, immigrants and now, it seems, ivory. Conservationists report that the price of ivory in Asia has quadrupled since 2010.
Ganamé said traditional superstitions – such as the belief that an elephant herd’s arrival heralds rain – had long prevented ivory poachers from eliciting the complicity of residents of the sparsely populated Gourma region. He claimed an income supplementation scheme by the Wild Foundation had offered an “honest alternative” for young men who otherwise might have joined the Jihad. The scheme provides part-time work for 500 shepherds and farmers along the elephants’ migration route. They chart the animals’ progress and aim to settle human-animal conflicts when they arise.
One “elephant vigilante”, in the Hombori area of Gourma, said that “god-crazies” had attempted to recruit him on several occasions since 2012. Speaking on condition that his name be withheld, the 40-year-old farmer said: “They offered me a monthly salary as an organiser of 300,000 CFA francs ($516/£340). Ordinary recruits are paid at least 100,000 CFA. These are figures that people like me can never hope to earn from growing millet.”
He said the Wild Foundation provided a motorbike for his daily elephant rounds, fuel and some food aid. “I do not watch the elephants for the money but because they were here long before us humans. Looking after them gives my life meaning. I also know that the god-crazies are liars, but not everyone understands that, especially when they have a family to feed.”
~The Guardian
in Bamako


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