Day 364- Another Ivory Crush!

Today was a huge day for the elephants!  SIX TONS OF IVORY was destroyed today in China at a public ceremony!  Let's keep crossing our fingers that this will be the start of another ban!  

On January 6, the government of China held a public ceremony to destroy six tons of elephant ivory seized from the illegal trade. The event took place in Dongguan in Guangdong Province.

Workers pushed tusks and ivory sculptures into a noisy, green crushing machine.

The event is the first of its kind in China and follows a crush of six tons of confiscated ivory in the U.S. in November, in Denver.

According to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which had representatives observing the crush in China, about 96 elephants a day are killed illegally in Africa, largely because of the demand for their ivory. Much of that ivory ends up in China, where it is carved and sold domestically or abroad.

There are an estimated 500,000 elephants left in Africa, and poaching them is a $10 billion business that draws international crime syndicates and terrorist groups.

International trade in ivory was outlawed in 1990, but poaching continues to fuel a thriving black market. Some legal sales of ivory stockpiles have also been allowed, which critics say has made enforcement more difficult. (Read "Ivory Worship" in National Geographic magazine.)

Over the years, a number of countries have participated in high-profile burns or crushes of confiscated ivory, including Kenya, Gabon, the Philippines, and the U.S.

Although ivory is seized at national borders, sale of ivory products remains legal domestically in the U.S. and China. Because the material is difficult to identify, date, and track, legal markets incentivize traffickers to try to cheat the system, critics such as the WCS say.

According to a WCS statement, "In the U.S., WCS seeks national and state moratoria on all purchases and sales of ivory, and in Asia WCS assists concerned citizens who wish to educate their countrymen and women through social media about the lethal cost of ivory to Africa's elephants."

Zhao Shucong, director of China's State Forestry Administration, admitted to the Washington Post that ivory smuggling is "still raging" and said that China is "in urgent need of sincere collaboration with different countries and international organizations" in its attempts at dealing with the problem.

Adding their voice to the mix, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tweeted, "We commend China for destroying more than 6 tons of illegal elephant ivory." But writing for Vice, Derek Mead was more measured: "China's ivory crush is a good first step, but that's all it is."

Mead added, "As long as there's legal ivory for sale and consumers who will pay top dollar for it, poachers will try to make a buck flipping illegal product."

~Brian Clark Howard

National Geographic

January 6, 2014

Go make a difference!

Day 363- Live • Love • Elephants

Live • Love • Elephants

What a great motto :)

Go make a difference!

Day 362- A Year's Worth Of Love

Wow, how the year has flown!  In just three days my blog will have reached it's 1-year anniversary!  

Go make a difference!

Day 361- Letter to the Elephants

Thank you so much for this amazing email from the kind people at March for Elephants! 

~~~~~~~~~~

I think we always need to think about what's going on in the world- and not just politics.  We need to remember these animals.  In Africa, every 15 minutes, an elephant is slaughtered due to poaching.  In Asia, elephants are being abused every day for tourist's entertainment.  Taking animals out of the wild for profit, to be used for amusement, strikes me as inhumane.

As you start off this new year, remind yourself of the unfairness that these animals are constantly facing, and don't take life for granted.   

Dear Elephant,

I write to you at the end of the year 2013. A year during which 35,000 of your kind were slaughtered, 96 a day and 1 killed every 15 minutes... all for trinkets. All for ivory trinkets.  

I wonder...

As one year merges with the next and as humans celebrate the end of the year 2013 and herald new beginnings in 2014, as we cross that irreversible rubicon in time I cannot help but wonder... a 100 years from now... a million.... ten years from now..5 years from now.... will you be a ghost, a figment of human imagination... a creature lost amongst the hundreds and thousands and millions of creatures my kind have caused to disappear, to disappear forever?

Will you be a creature I visit in my dreams or will you still be our wandering and constant gardener, keeper of the great green cathedrals of Earth, our Earth, yours and mine, this "pale blue dot", the blue planet, a little speck spinning on its axis, bringing us night and day in the vast and lonely sea of space .. will you still be scenting the air... trunk raised...40 thousand muscle working in unison, a work of art, evolved over millions of years of time ..trumpeting your presence... singing your song.. interpreting a contoured topography of sound and smell.... and feeling.

Will you still be wandering in some distant land feeling the earth with your feet in ways we never could.... scenting water in ways we never could... planting and growing forests in ways we never could... building rivers and wells and streams in ways we never could.... remembering ancient pathways from a thousand years ago in ways we never could.. caring for your young in ways we have only barely began to understand and noble in ways unfathomable... truly, I believe you are a better creature than I ever could be... as surely as I believe that if humans erase your presence from the Earth... we surely don't deserve the Earth... surely not.

Forgive us dear Elephant .. for the many ways in which we have abused you... exploited you, discussed you, analyzed you, commodified you, pontificated about you in ways utilitarian as though you were yet another "thing" to be "managed" by man (as you know we love to "manage" things) .... a "thing" to be discussed at "trade conventions" and measured against (always against) what is "better' for humankind...our arrogance has grown to be astounding and abhorrent ...this arrogance is an aberration of nobility.. it is everything you are not... and that arrogance must end... we who "see" you, we who see equivalence in all life.. and the suffering of all life.. whether human or animal.. we will stand for you.... in the best ways we know how.

Dear Elephant, I sign off In solidarity with you and our mother, the Earth. May 2014 be a better year for you and all creatures non-human who are abused at the hand of man. It's really my only wish for 2014.

Elephant, May you Live!

Go make a difference!

Day 360- The Connection Between Poaching and Infant Mortality

A herd of elephants gather at a watering hole inside Hwange National Park, about 840 km (521 miles) outside Harare, October 28, 2013

(Reuters) - What do infant mortality and elephant poaching have in common? Plenty, according to conservation groups.

Researchers have for the first time made clear connections between elephant poaching in Africa, which has been surging to meet soaring ivory demand in Asia, and factors such as poverty, as shown by high rates of child deaths, and corruption.

These links have always been suspected but never pinned down with hard data.

The findings come in a report prepared for an African elephant summit in Botswana in December by groups including TRAFFIC, which tracks the global trade in wildlife products, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Areas where child mortality and poverty are worst also see higher levels of elephant poaching, but poor villagers typically do not benefit from the illicit ivory trade.

In this regard, the ivory trade - with its long and blood-stained history - is similar to other extractive industries in Africa, which have been exploited to meet demand elsewhere with few rewards for local people.

Demand for ivory - used for carvings and valued for millennia for its color and texture - has been rising sharply in newly affluent Asian countries, notably China, fuelling a new wave of elephant slaughter.

Following a decline in the 1990s, poaching of the world's largest land mammal has risen dramatically and in 2012 an estimated 15,000 elephants were illegally killed at 42 sites in Africa monitored by MIKE - the U.N.-backed program for Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants.

Since 2010, elephant poaching levels in Africa have exceeded 5 percent of the total population - a tipping point because killings are now outpacing the animals' birth rate.

In a related trend, the killing of rhinos for their horns - used in traditional medicine in Vietnam and China - has also soared, notably in South Africa, home to the vast majority of the animals.

Reuters

Ed Stoddard

According to South African government statistics, as of December 19, a record 946 rhinos had been poached in the country in 2013, compared to 668 in all of 2012.

~Ed Stoddard

Reuters

January 2, 2014

Go make a difference!

Day 359- Happy New Year!

Wishing everybody an "elephantastic" New Year!  

Go make a difference!

Day 358- Tanzania Sees 'Sharp Rise' In Killing of Elephants

Elephants are under threat across Africa, campaigners say

The killing of elephants has increased sharply in Tanzania since the government suspended its anti-poaching operation after a month, Deputy Tourism Minister Lazaro Nyalandu has said.

Sixty elephants were "butchered" in November and December, compared with only two in October, Mr Nyalandu added.

The security forces adopted a shoot-to-kill policy against poachers when the operation was in force in October.

The government suspended it after an inquiry reported human rights abuses.

'Huge demand'

"The anti-poaching operation had good intentions, but the reported murders, rapes and brutality are totally unacceptable," Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda was quoted by Reuters news agency as saying earlier this month.

The inquiry, carried out by MPs, found that 13 civilians were killed and more than 1,000 people arrested during the month-long crackdown, codenamed "Operation Terminate".

The findings led to President Jakaya Kikwete sacking Defence Minister Shamsi Vuai Nahodha, Home Affairs Minister Emmanuel Nchimbi, Tourism and Natural Resources Minister Khamis Kagasheki and Livestock Development Minister David Mathayo.

Mr Nyalandu said that, with the operation suspended, the government would appeal to foreign donors to help strengthen Tanzania's wildlife department and ranger service.

"Those to be approached include the European Union and Asian countries. Asian countries are reportedly the main consumers of elephant tusks and by-products," he said.

There is huge demand for elephant tusks in many Asian countries, where they are used to make ornaments.

In October, Ivorian football star Yaya Toure joined a UN campaign against poaching, warning the slaughter of elephants threatened their existence in Africa.

~BBC News Africa

December 30, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 357- 2013 In Review!

Just for fun, I decided to do a challenge about this year!  Quiz your knowledge on elephants and this blog!  

You can send in your answers multiple ways: 

email me at: eis4elephants@gmail.com

or

respond to this post!

You can be the winner!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. What are five things elephants represent?

2. How many signatures were presented to Thailand's Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra?

3. What huge event took place in November?

4. What important person did I get a letter from?

5. What are three extinct species from Madagascar?

6. About how many Bornean Pygmy Elephants are left in the wild?

7. What fun event took place in October?

8. What are three ways of saying "I love elephants"?

9. What percentage of elephants are dead?

10.  What amazing article did I feature on my blog in December, and who was it about?

Have fun, and don't forget to send in your answers!

Go make a difference!

Day 357- When It All Stops

“When the buying stops, the killing can too.”

~Yao Ming

Saving elephants, as followers of The Independent’s Christmas Appeal will know, seems to be a harder and harder task as the killing in Africa gets more difficult to control. But there is one particular way forward which offers hope, and which at first may seem surprising, and that is through saving sharks.

A giant vegetarian land mammal wouldn’t at first sight seem to have much in common with a deep-sea predator. But elephants and sharks share a cruel curiosity of fate: they both have bodily protuberances which humans find so valuable they will kill both sets of creatures to get them.

With elephants, or course, it’s their ivory tusks, now in booming demand especially among the rising middle class of China. With sharks, it’s their fins, an essential ingredient in what has long been another fad of wealthy Chinese: shark’s fin soup.

While elephants are killed in their thousands, sharks are killed in their millions for the soup.  The slaughter is having a drastic effect on shark populations, with 32 per cent of deep-sea species threatened with extinction.

“Shark finning” is a pitiless form of fishing involving cutting off the fins while the fish are still alive and then throwing them back into the sea. The reason is a pair of shark fins can sell in Asia for $700 a kilo – and the less valuable shark bodies would be an encumbrance on a fisherman’s boat.

But in July this year the European Union brought in a regulation ending the practice, and in future all EU boats will have to land sharks with their fins still attached.

Ali Hood, of Britain’s Shark Trust, sees this as a major step forward, not least because the EU is a big player in the shark market, with Spain alone having the third-biggest shark catch in the world, and also because the move will give the EU the moral authority to persuade other nations to do the same. But the biggest obstacle to lessening the global shark slaughter is the demand from China.

In 2006, the inventive conservation body WildAid, based in San Francisco and headed by British-born Peter Knights, began a campaign to make the Chinese public realise that shark’s fin soup represents a big conservation problem. 

The campaign took off when in 2009 China’s best-known sports star, basketball player Yao Ming, appeared in a film saying he would no longer eat the soup and used the slogan “Mei yu mai mai, jiu mei yu sha hai”, meaning “When the buying stops, the killing can too.”

The campaign appears to be having a significant effect: according to WildAid, consumption of shark fin soup has dropped by between 50 and 70 per cent in the last two years, and this month, the Chinese government banned shark fin soup from state banquets.

Now WildAid is rolling out a campaign, based on the shark fin ads, to lessen demand for ivory and rhino horn by making it socially unacceptable. Its first short film, featuring Yao Ming again, alongside Prince William and David Beckham, will air in China next month.

Mr Knights says: “The slogan and the sentiment, of connecting the buying and the killing, is already understood throughout China… And because elephants are more charismatic than sharks, and because the international profile is so much higher on the ivory issue, we really believe it can happen.”

He hopes the Chinese Government might even consider banning the sale of ivory within two years. 

~Michael McCarthy 

The Independent

December 23, 2013

Go make a difference!