Elephants — Africa & The Middle East

“War is not too strong a word to describe what happened in Cameroon’s Bouba N’Djida National Park… Bouba N’Djida, 850 square miles, is the largest national park in the country… [In December 2011] villagers living near the park reported encountering mounted gangs of armed men… According to the villagers, the poachers were quite open about what they were doing… They intended to kill as many elephants and collect as much ivory as they possibly could. Kill they did, with AK-47 assault rifles, PRG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launches, M80 explosives and enough ammunition for a long siege. By late February when an IFAW team arrived on the scene, the park was littered with corpses… Park conservationist Mathieu Fomepa told Agence France-Presse that at least 480 animals had been killed… [It is] now believed that Janjaweed were involved… The money they would earn from the ivory raid would go to buy weapons to increase their clan’s political might.”

“As recently as ten years ago, out of every ten African elephants that died, four fell at the hands of poachers. The figure today is eight.” "The illegal demand for ivory is the biggest driver of elephant poaching... tens of thousands of elephants are killed to meet a growing demand for ivory products in the Far East. Asia stands behind a steadily increasing trend in illegal ivory and there are still thriving domestic ivory markets in Africa. Limited resources combined with remote and inaccessible elephant habitats make it difficult for governments to monitor and protect elephant herds. 2011 saw the highest volume of illegal ivory seized since global records began in 1989."

“The reasons are simple: people have killed too many elephants for their ivory; and too many people have robbed the elephants of their historical habitat. As we have seen, elephants have always been hunted and used by humans in a multiplicity of ways, some uncaring, some worshipful. But the number of elephants captured alive for warfare, for circuses and zoos, for food, logging and religion, while widespread, pales into insignificance against the numbers killed for their tusks. Human lust for ivory is the elephant’s curse; trade in ivory is almost as old as trade itself.”

“In 2002 Kruger formally merged with Limpopo National Park in Mozambique and Gonarezhou in Zimbabwe. Kruger, itself a 7,700-square-mile chunk of land in the northeast corner of South Africa, was now dropping the fences between it and the two neighboring parks, effectively doubling its area." Locking up great swaths of land for elephant habitat across Africa.

“In 1994, six [now seven] African countries signed the Lusaka Agreement on Cooperative Enforcement Operations Directed at Illegal Trade in Wild Fauna and Flora, designed to coordinate anti-poaching and wildlife crime enforcement activities across a broad swathe of the continent… In April 2010 it carried out a successful sting operation against two ivory-poaching kingpins in cooperation with the Zambian Wildlife Authority”

Between 5 and 10 million elephants roamed Africa in the 1930s. That number was down to 1.3 million in the 1970s. By 1992, “Tanzania’s elephants had dropped from nearly 250,000 in the early 1970s to 55,000; Uganda’s from 20,000 to barely 1,000, headed fast toward zero. Kenya, home to 140,000 elephants in 1970, held perhaps 16,000, and there was what amounted to a small-scale war over elephants under way in the country.”

"Between 5 and 10 million elephants roamed Africa in the 1930s. By 1977 the numbers were down to about 1.3 million. Twenty years later less than half of these remained."

“In 1989 Tanzania launched Operation Uhai, a 21-month initiative against poachers combining 1,000 men each from the army and police with 200 wildlife Department and National Parks officers in the Selous region. The operation, which cost $5.2 million, netted 11,411 firearms, 3,044 elephant tusks and 2,607 poachers, dealers and traders. It effectively brought poaching to a standstill country-wide."

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) banned African Elephant ivory for commercial trade, with a few highly controversial exceptions, in 1989. Today, 178 countries are Parties of CITES. One example of success, Kenya’s population rebounded by a thousand animals a year, in the years after the ban.

CITES “had no legal teeth, even amongst its 113 signatory nations. There were too many loopholes in its regulations, and little chance of finally distinguishing on the ground between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, ‘worked’ and ‘unworked’ ivory. (A recent report estimated 94 percent of ivory merchandise sold on eBay; eBay has now banned it.) More damagingly still, CITES was at times partly funded by, and therefore reluctant to alienate, ivory traders themselves.”

African Elephant Conservation Act is passed in the United States, creating a ban on ivory imports from states dealing with illegal ivory traffic. Imports from Somalia, Gabon, Chad and Ethiopia are immediately prohibited.

“In 1979 one ton of ivory had represented about 54 dead elephants, by 1987 it represented a minimum of about 113 dead elephants… [more likely] 170 elephants.”

“For those deeply concerned about the level of elephant poaching, one ivory statistic in particular stood out as a grim warning that some populations were indeed in crisis: the average weight of tusks being traded. From twenty-one pounds per tusk in 1979, the figure has fallen to a new low in the mid-1980s — 11.4 pounds. This could only mean that there were fewer bulls left carrying large ivory, and that breeding-age females and even juveniles were being targeted… Some populations, in other words, were being killed off faster than they could reproduce.”