Day 367- 90% Poached

While the picture below is from 2011, you can imagine how much these facts have been inflated.  In parts of Africa 90% of deceased elephants were slaughtered for their tusks.

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Day 366- The Facts

Photograph by Beverly Joubert

"Tanzania’s elephant population declined from an estimated 109,000 elephants in 2009 to around 70,000 in 2012, according to the Tanzania Elephant Protection Society. Around 30 elephants are killed for their ivory every day, almost 11,000 each year."

This is a portion of an article Sarah Morrison wrote for The Independent yesterday.  I found these facts absolutely horrifying!  I can't believe that so many elephants are killed per day in Tanzania alone!  

Photograph by Tim Laman

"More than 100,000 Asian elephants may have existed at the start of the 20th century. The population is estimated to have fallen by at least 50% over the last 60-75 years."

World Wildlife Fund has never let me down!  These facts trouble me too, however.  There is somewhere between 25,600 and 32,750 Asian elephants left, also according to WWF.  

"Only when the last of the animals horns', tusks, skins and bones are sold, will mankind realize that money can never buy back our wildlife."

The author of this quote is unknown, and this is a altered version of an old Native saying, but when I came across it, it immediately caught my eye.  As  Joni Mitchell and many others have said, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone they paved paradise and put up a parking lot." Not only is it unfair to our wildlife that animals are being killed for human greed, but it will also be unfair to our grandchildren, their grandchildren, and theirs.  At the rate we're going, elephants are going to be completely wiped out in 2025.  That's only TEN years away!  Poaching NEEDS to stop! 

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Day 365- A year!

What a great year!  I have had the pleasure to meet so many amazing people who share my love for elephants and have come in contact with  influential people like Hillary Clinton and former Pope Benedict XVI! Studying these amazing animals has been so interesting, and I can't wait to learn even more about them!  Lets hope that this year will be better for the elephants!  

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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

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Day 363- Live • Love • Elephants

Live • Love • Elephants

What a great motto :)

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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!  

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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!

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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

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Day 359- Happy New Year!

Wishing everybody an "elephantastic" New Year!  

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