Elephant Retirement!

Finally, a good place for elephants to retire from zoos, circuses and rides!  And some peace and quiet, too!

The elephants of North America now have a place to retire -- sunny Florida.

The National Elephant Center, a 225-acre home for retired or unwanted elephants, welcomed it's first four residents in May. The center is located in Fellsmere, Fla., which provides an ideal climate and environment for the African and Asian elephants that will eventually roam there, including watering holes and areas to wallow in mud. (Take a look at a plan of the center here)

The $15 million complex is supported by a network of zoos and wildlife organizations and will eventually house dozens of elephants long-term.

The center will not be open to the public.

Asian elephants are currently listed as endangered and African elephants are considered vulnerable. Demand for elephant ivory in Asia has brought widespread poaching, even within protected habitats.

~Huff Post Green

June 9, 2013

Do you think they'll take summer interns!?

Go make a difference!

Bad Reality TV Gets Worse

Hunting for fun..... hunting to set records...... hunting because you can.......

Are any of these good enough reasons to kill innocent animals?  Both sharks and elephants suffer from this cruel punishment.  Is it really fair?

Also, these large animals have a much longer gestation period; it takes a long time for these animals to reach this size.  It's not easy to "grow" an elephant or a mako shark.  These animals are not disposable.  And we have to treat them as such.  

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif.—News that a sport-fisherman reeled in—and kept—a potentially record-setting mako shark off the Southern California coast earlier this week is making waves with conservationists, who berated the catch because shark populations are vulnerable to overfishing worldwide.

The female shark caught Monday off Huntington Beach weighed in at just over 1,323 pounds. It was 11 feet long and measured 8 feet around its sizeable midsection, said Kent Williams, a California-certified fish weight master and owner of New Fishall Bait, where the shark was taken for frozen storage.

Jason Johnston, of Mesquite, Texas, caught the massive fish after a 2 1/2-hour battle, the Orange County Register reported.

If the catch is confirmed and meets conditions, it would exceed the 1,221-pound record mako catch made in July 2001 off the coast of Chatham, Mass., said Jack Vitek, world records coordinator for the Florida-based International Game Fish Association. It takes about two months for the association to verify domestic catches, he told the Los Angeles Times.

For now, Williams is keeping the shark in a refrigerated storage unit, stuffed into a 3-by-5-foot metal bin on wheels from which its tail and head spill out. Layered rows of razor-sharp teeth line the shark's mouth, which was frozen halfway shut Wednesday. A rope was still looped around its dorsal fin.

Under state law, anglers can take two such sharks per outing, although such catches are exceedingly rare, Williams said.

"Ninety-nine out of 100 people who are out fishing for sharks catch this and will not be able to land it. There's very few of these caught each year, but every time one's caught, people make a big deal about it," he told the AP.

On Wednesday, angry callers from as far away as Australia were phoning Williams' wholesale fish bait business to complain that he was storing the shark there.

The shark should have been released, argued David McGuire, director of the California-based protection advocacy group Shark Stewards.

"People should be viewing these sharks as wonderful animals that are important to the ocean and admiring how beautiful they are" rather than "spilling their blood and guts," McGuire told the Times.

But any sport fisherman who has a potential world record is not going to release the fish, Williams said. "I don't care what they say. If they have a potential world record, they're going to take that fish—if they can."

Only 23 of the 6,850 world records on file with the game association involve fish topping 1,300 pounds, Vitek said. The largest catch was a 2,664-pound great white shark that was taken in 1959 off the Australian coast.

"Seeing a fish over 1,000 pounds—whether it's a shark, a tuna or a billfish—it's extremely rare," Vitek said.

Plans call for the shark to be donated for research.

Johnston came to California to film a game-hunting television program called "Jim Shockey's The Professionals" for the Outdoor Channel.

Southern California is considered to be a nursery ground for mako sharks. But the ones that are caught are usually between 2 1/2 and 6 feet long, said Nick Wegner, a fisheries research biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

"Encountering one this big is rare," he said.

The catch was made aboard the chartered fishing vessel Breakaway, out of Huntington Beach. Skipper Matt Potter told the Times that the boat only kept one mako for a total of 18 passengers who were out three days. The rest were released, he said.

Still, McGuire said sharks should be left alone.

"These kind of reality shows are not reality," he said. "The reality is we're overfishing sharks and this macho big-game attitude should be a relic of the past." 

~Gillian Flaccus

Contra Costa Times

June 5, 2013

Go make a difference!

View From THE ATLANTIC

"Please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of goodwill: let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God's plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment. Let us not allow omens of destruction and death to accompany the advance of this world!"

- Pope Francis, March 19

Inside the Global Industry That's Slaughtering Africa's Elephants

The scale of poaching is a criminal horror. Why Obama should make it a priority issue -- in his meeting with China's Xi Jinping this week and beyond.

Members of the Pilanesberg National Park Anti-Poaching Unit (APU) stand guard as conservationists and police investigate the scene of a rhino poaching incident April 19, 2012. (Mike Hutchings/Reuters)

Destruction and Death, as Pope Francis offered this homily in St. Peter's Square, had just left the scene in the central African nation of Chad, where in a single night in mid-March 89 elephants were slaughtered for their tusks. Reports described the ivory poachers as 50 or so men on camel and horseback, speaking Arabic, armed with AK-47s, and presumed to be the same band that came over from Sudan last year to execute more than 450 elephants in Cameroon -- on that foray, dispatching their victims with rocket-propelled grenades.

In Chad, near the Cameroon border to the south, they left their mark by sparing not even the 33 pregnant females and 15 elephant calves, and by hacking off the tusks while some of the creatures were still alive. There were four park rangers on duty that night, short a fifth guard who was murdered by poachers last year. But they were far away at the time, and, in any case, would have been helpless against overwhelming force. Among other problems, the elephant preserve is about 850 square miles, a big stretch of creation for just four guys to protect.

East, west, and central - everywhere there are elephants in Africa, there are "poachers," a word that now seems far too small for the enormity of their offense. And if we want to take seriously those words from Francis -- a new pontiff named for the saint who despised cruelty, whose very first sermon spoke of "respecting each of God's creatures" -- this would be a very good place to focus our attention. Unless Western and African nations can turn things around fast, to protect the 400,000 or so left, then the elephants of Africa, pretty much all of them, will be gone.

A United Nations Rapid Response Assessment (the UN may be slow to act, but the assessments come quick) puts last year's losses around 32,000 African elephants, as compared to 2011 casualties of 25,000, reporting "mass and gruesome killings of elephants." From the air, as correspondent Bryan Christy of National Geographic writes from Cameroon, it looks like this: "[T]he scattered bodies present a senseless crime scene - you can see which animals fled, which mothers tried to protect their young, how one terrified herd of 50 went down together."

From the air, too, is how they're often slaughtered -- in numbers, Christy thinks, perhaps double those UN estimates. It's guesswork, more speculative than ever as poachers pick up the pace in military-style operations that now include firing their AK-47s from helicopters. Like the more advanced weaponry of the killers, their night-vision goggles and other such assets, and the sheer number of them aswarm in Africa, the helicopters signal yet another bad turn in this old struggle. There's big money in ivory, a boundless market for it, and everyone knows where most of it is heading.

It's China, where status seekers simply must have ivory trinkets, jewelry, and statues to proclaim their new wealth. Apparently, nothing in Chinese says "I've arrived" like a carved tusk, and they go for about $1,300 a pound or more these days -- many times what it used to be -- or as much as $50,000 for a sizable pair of tusks on the street in China. Tusks on the market are getting smaller because the elephants are dying younger. All but a few with fully grown tusks have vanished. A ton of ivory now -- and smuggled shipments actually deal in such quantities -- involves a lot more grief in the taking.

The government of Kenya reports that 90 percent of ivory smugglers caught there are Chinese citizens. One fellow was picked up recently with 439 pieces of ivory on him, and in a Nairobi courtroom fined less than a dollar for each. Kenyan authorities vow to enact harsher penalties to "fight poachers at all levels to save our elephants," and other governments had better do the same, quickly. It is getting out by every route, at airports, in large containers at seaports on either coast of Africa, in small fishing vessels, or simply by mail, and most of the ivory is bound for China. The rest goes to Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and other Asian friends of the United States, in routine disregard of the ivory ban that the United States led a generation ago. Africa's finite supply is meeting Asia's furious demand at a rate of nearly a hundred kills every 24 hours. The death count, that one night in Chad, is the continent's daily average.

As with other wild animals, managerial talk of simply "conserving the species" can miss the point, as if they are to be thought of and cared about only in the collective. But taking the basic numbers -- some 12 million elephants south of the Sahara in the early 1900's, versus 400,000 today and probably closer to 350,000 -- this is a species killed off to about 3 percent of its population in the space of a hundred years, less time than the combined normal life spans of a single elephant and her mother. You would never know from those numbers how universally appreciated they are, the esteem in which these "charismatic mega-fauna" are held in every part of the world, at least by people who can look at an elephant and see more than ivory to sell or a "trophy" to mount. The mania for ivory among carvers, collectors, and well-to-do buyers in Asia is especially hard to comprehend, since no work of man could begin to match the glorious beauty of an elephant. They cherish ivory for its "purity," once the blood is washed off.

Granting an inexorable historical decline under the pressure of Africa's human population, even apart from poaching and hunting, a sacrifice of 97 percent has been exacted already. Yet we still hear calls for more "culling," never more galling than when they come from Western intellectuals who take notice, now and then, of the plight of the elephant only to cite it as yet another example of how unenlightened humanity can benefit from their economic theories. Saving the elephants, as one of these arguments runs, is a misguided and sentimental cause: the real problem here is not is not butchery, but disorganized butchery. It all just needs to be a little more systematic. "In essence, elephants need to be treated like cattle," writes Doug Bandow, a longtime fellow at the CATO Institute in a recent Forbes op-ed. "Unfortunately, episodic [ivory] sales have only limited benefits, generating modest revenues while failing to satisfy ongoing demand." Therefore, "the West should reopen the ivory trade," creating "a genuine market in ivory," while also meeting demand for "other elephant parts."

There's a nice sendoff for the noble elephant: If only mankind had treated them all "like cattle," owning and exploiting them to maximum efficiency -- and all for a frivolous luxury item. Never mind that in all of Africa tourism of the non-lethal kind is the second-largest hard currency earner after oil, and that all of this slaughter amounts to a near-complete liquidation of the greatest natural asset sub-Saharan Africa had going for it. Never mind that tusks take decades to mature, growing all through the lifetime of an elephant, and ivory providers and consumers are not exactly known for their patient adherence to the rhythms of nature. And, above all, erase from your mind any thought of the complex social structures, bonds of family, intelligence, and emotions of elephants already dying en masse in conditions little different from some infernal abattoir. All creatures of the earth must pull their weight in obedience to the unsparing laws of the market. That's the verdict from the sunny offices of a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.

The farming model works, we're told, in the case of elephant trophy hunting. For a lively afternoon in the forest, Western hunters, many from America, pay 15 or 20 grand -- as compared, if we have to put a price on it, with an estimated $800,000 as an ongoing tourism draw, living out an elephant's allotted 60 or 70 years in peace. When the time is right for each in turn, argues Bandow, why not shoot them for the ivory, too? Our man at CATO sees a day when "a population of 500,000 elephants could naturally generate $6.7 billion worth of ivory annually," meaning, "naturally," that every last one gets cut up in the end.

It's quite an ambitious plan: They get owned and disowned all at once. But it's a long way from protecting "God's plan inscribed in nature," and I think I'll go with Francis on this one. Culling, a suspect term in any context, should be withdrawn in shame from all further discussion of these creatures and their fate. No matter what claims are made for killing them, reason and fairness will be on their side. If any wild species can be said to have endured enough at the hands of cruel and arrogant men, it is the elephant.

Among the surviving herds, even in places that once offered sanctuary, elephants live in such fear that they can now be observed avoiding roads and waterholes they once frequented and people they once trusted. Even these most sensitive of wild creatures could never begin to fathom all of the human appetites and designs that have joined to cause their suffering. They could use a little more guile now than nature gave them, but they know what they need to know. Their protectors in Africa describe a state of panic and high alert in every herd. They have memories as good as a map, aware of well guarded areas, and they "don't want to move outside unless they have to," explains Frank Pope of Save the Elephants, a group in Nairobi founded by the renowned zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton. "When the urge to reach a new area becomes too strong, they'll often wait for nightfall before making a rapid streak across the landscape until they reach another safe zone."

It's the rare juvenile who has not witnessed the slaughter of a mother, sibling, or other family member, if not everyone they knew. The great souls in Africa who have taken in the orphans tell us that the calves have nightmares, and sometimes, no matter how much care and comfort are offered, just never recover from what they have seen and lost. For all of the elephants, writes J. Michael Fay of National Geographic, their only defense is "to run for their lives at every crack of a gun. All this horror so a human being somewhere can satisfy the desire for ivory."

~Matthew Scully

The Atlantic

June 6, 2013

Go make a difference!

Edible Elephants- For Vegetarians!

As a last-day-of-school treat, one of my amazing teachers, Mrs. B., gave me a marshmallow elephant!  I felt bad eating it, as it so cute, but it was super yummy!

Thanks, Mrs. B.!  I love you!

Happy Summer!

Go make a difference!

Snakes, and Wolves, and Elephants... Oh My!

Do we really love animals?

Go make a difference!

Critically Endangered Elephants Killed By Poison, Guns

Poachers are now relying on war weapons, poison, guns, and watermelons.  (See an interesting article about how watermelons kill elephants here)

Poisoned elephants

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Poisoning or shooting killed many of the 129 critically endangered elephants that have died on Indonesia's Sumatra island in less than a decade, highlighting weak enforcement of laws against poaching, an environmental group says.

WWF Indonesia said killings of Sumatran elephants are on the rise, with 29 either shot or poisoned last year, including 14 in Aceh province. The group said Tuesday that no one has been convicted or jailed in the deaths that were counted in Riau province since 2004.

The report came three days after two dead Sumatran elephants were found near a paper plantation in Riau, allegedly poisoned by poachers. Another elephant was killed last month near Tesso Nilo national park and its tusks were hacked off. An autopsy found a plastic detergent wrapper in its belly filled with poison.

 The group said 59 percent of the dead elephants were definitely poisoned, 13 percent were suspected to have been poisoned, and 5 percent were killed by gunshots. Others died from illness or other causes, or the reason for their death was unknown.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the animals as "critically endangered" after their numbers dropped to between 2,400 and 2,800 from an estimated 5,000 in 1985. Environmentalists say the elephants could be extinct within three decades unless they are protected.

The decline is largely due to destruction of their habitat. Forests across Sumatra are being logged for timber, palm oil, and pulp and paper.

Sumatra has some of the most significant populations of Asian elephants outside of India and Sri Lanka and is also home to tigers, orangutans and rhinos.

"Effective action on the ground should be taken immediately to protect Sumatran elephants from extinction, especially in Riau," the report said. There are about 300 elephants left in Riau, which is part of Sumatra island.

Achmad Saeroji, head of the government conservation agency in Riau, denied the allegation of lax law enforcement, saying at least eight cases have been handled by authorities recently.

"We always investigate every case of elephants found dead," he said. "But it is hard to capture the perpetrators, either because of late reports or the fear of people to report the poachers, who work in a network."

Indonesia's elephants sometimes venture into populated areas searching for food. They destroy crops or attack humans, making them unpopular with villagers. Some are shot or poisoned with cyanide-laced fruit, while others are killed by poachers for their ivory.

~The Boston Herald

June 4, 2013

Go make a difference!

Kony Using Elephants To Support "Struggling Group"

In good news, Kony is struggling.  In bad news, he's using elephants to solve his problems!

In "The Sound Of Music," Reverend Mother says to Maria:

These walls were not built to shut out problems. You have to face them. You have to live the life you were born to live.

In this case, Kony is using the elephants to shut out his problems.

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — Members of a militia run by fugitive African warlord Joseph Kony are killing elephants across Central Africa to support Kony's struggling group, according to a report by watchdog organizations that are urging the expansion of programs to encourage defections from the Lord's Resistance Army.

The Enough Project, the Satellite Sentinel Project and two other groups said in the report released Monday that the LRA has turned to elephant poaching "as a means to sustain itself," and that the militia uses money from the illegal trade in ivory to acquire food and other supplies.

"With prices at record-high levels, trading illegal ivory offers the LRA another way to sustain itself in addition to its habitual pillaging," the report said. "Former senior fighters who defected from the group report that the LRA trades ivory for arms, ammunition, and food."

The report said Kony, a cruel warlord who is accused of using boys as fighters and girls as sex slaves, gave the order to butcher elephants for their ivory as far back as 2010. Former captives say that LRA groups in Central African Republic and Congo "trade ivory with unidentified people who arrive in helicopters."

In February Ugandan troops operating in Central African Republic discovered six elephant tusks believed to have been hidden in the bush by the LRA. Ugandan army officials said at the time that they were acting on information given by an LRA defector who said Kony long ago instructed his fighters to find ivory and bring it to him.

Experts say that Africa's elephants are under increased threat from habitat loss and poachers motivated by rising demand for ivory in Asia. About 70 years ago, up to 5 million elephants are believed to have roamed sub-Saharan Africa. Today fewer than a million remain. The elephants of Central Africa, a region long plagued by armed conflict and lawlessness, are especially vulnerable. Much of the harvested ivory ends up as small trinkets.

The new report said Congo's expansive but poorly protected Garamba National Park, which once was used by LRA commanders as safe haven, is the source of some of the ivory that ends up before Kony. But Garamba's elephants also are being targeted by "members of the armed forces of (Congo), South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda," the report said, citing the concerns of park rangers there.

It said the LRA is part of "the larger poaching crisis that puts wild African elephants at risk of local extinction."

Facing pressure from U.S.-backed African Union troops tasked with eliminating its leaders, the LRA —which used to have several thousand men — is now degraded and scattered in small numbers in Congo, South Sudan, and Central African Republic. Fewer than 500 LRA rebels are still active in the bush, according to the Ugandan military, but they can conduct hit-and-run operations that terrorize villagers and move across the region's porous borders in small groups.

Kony himself is believed to be highly mobile, but the U.S.-based watchdog group Resolve said in a report in April that he recently directed killings from an enclave protected by the Sudanese military. Until early this year, Resolve's report said, Kony and some of his commanders were operating in Kafia Kingi, a disputed area along the Sudan-South Sudan border where African troops tasked with catching Kony don't have access. Sudan's government denies this charge.

Kony, whose rebellion originated in Uganda before spreading to other parts of Central Africa, was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2005 for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Last year he became the focus of international attention after the advocacy group Invisible Children released a popular online video highlighting LRA crimes and calling for Kony to be stopped from recruiting children.

Some 100 U.S. military advisers are helping Uganda-led African troops to hunt down Kony and other LRA commanders. Their mission was recently set back by a change in government in Central African Republic, where former rebels who now control the country are reportedly hostile to foreign troops. Anti-Kony operations there have been suspended since April, raising fears among watchdog groups that the LRA could use the opportunity to recruit or regroup.

Poaching has also been rampant in the Dzanga-Sangha reserve in the rainforests of southwestern Central African Republic where more than 3,400 forest elephants roam, conservationists have reported. The political chaos since March has allowed poaching to escalate, and anti-poaching rangers who fled the rebel-controlled areas said that Sudanese hunters are now working in tandem with the armed rebels who overthrew the government in March.

~RODNEY MUHUMUZA

Yahoo News

June 3, 2013

Go make a difference!

My Elephant Lifestyle!

Because I love elephants, I seem to find them quite often in my possessions!  Here are a few of my favorites!

Bath and Body Works hand sanitizer case

.......And hand sanitizer!
P.S. Thanks, Cristina!

The book: Ella the Elegant Elephant

We know the author and illustrator, and he (Steven D'amico, illustrator) drew personalized pictures for my sister, Honor, and I!

My sister's drawing!

All of my elephant books!

My adoption certificate!  

My collection of elephant figurines!  A combination of a teapot, Calico Critters, and glass ones from my friends!
P.S. Thanks Abby!

Do you have any fun collections?  Tell me!  

eis4elephants@gmail.com

Go make a difference!

The Truth In Poaching

Sad, but true.

"We cannot just shrug our shoulders and no longer be shocked by the human and environmental disasters unfolding before our very eyes."

Bonn — More civil unrest in Africa, another coup d'état, more reports of child soldiers in the front line, involvement of foreign troops, the poorest of the poor losing what little they have - and all the while the proceeds of a country's wealth are diverted from much-needed social and economic development to financing death and destruction. It is an all too familiar tale, a previous though somewhat different chapter of which was brought to the attention of a wider audience through Edward Zwick's film "Blood Diamond".

Zwick recounted the story of the civil war in Sierra Leone, where the conflict was financed through the illegal trafficking of precious stones. National Geographic and World Wide Fund for Nature have already likened this trade to recent developments.

Now, however, it is not Africa's mineral wealth but its wildlife resources that are being misused - for "blood diamond" read "blood ivory". And it is the blood of Africa's fast-diminishing population of elephants that is being spilled.

In February 2012, around 200 elephants were killed in Cameroon's Bouba N'Djida National Park. Outgunned by well-armed militiamen, the rangers were powerless to protect the animals, which were killed for their valuable tusks.

In January 2013 an entire family of elephants - 11 adults and a calf - was slaughtered in the worst single incident of its kind to have occurred in Kenya since the 1980s, an event described as "an unimaginable, heinous crime" by the Kenyan Wildlife Service.

Two months later 86 elephants were reported killed in the course of a single week in south-western Chad on their migration to the Central African Republic and Cameroon. The poachers were armed with AK47s and used hacksaws to remove the tusks.

The latest incident to reach the ears of the world's media in April 2013 has seen at least 26 elephants killed at Dzanga Bai, a clearing in the forest which acts as a wildlife viewing site in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in the Central African Republic (CAR). The site is inscribed in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List and is located near the borders with Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo.

Disaster fatigue is a real danger here. We cannot just shrug our shoulders and no longer be shocked by the human and environmental disasters unfolding before our very eyes.

~All Africa
June 1, 2013

Go make a difference!