The War on Elephants is the feature story by Don Pinnock in the latest issue of The Big Issue.
Everyone knows about the rhino crisis, but not quite as many seem to know that there’s a real crisis for Africa’s elephants as well – with one killed every 15 minutes.
In the current Big Issue, special correspondent Don Pinnock tells us exactly how bad the situation is, with as many as 35 000 hunted for their tusks each year.
China is the main consumer of ivory trinkets and a recent arrest in New York showed that 100 elephants had to die to make one ton of trinkets — ironically many of them little carvings of elephants, the very thing they’re destroying.
With current projections suggesting China’s middle-class consumers will increase by about 250 million in the next 10 to 15 years, there’s a critical need to conserve our protect our wildlife heritage.
One ray of light is that the United States, the second-biggest clearing house for ivory, has just banned all trade in ivory, including between states.
So how does Africa tackle this? The problem is that efforts to curb poaching have driven up demand, because scarcity drives values up. Anti-poaching needs to continue of course, but another way is to try and change hearts and minds in Asia, on the consumption end. It’s a huge task, but it needs to be tackled.
WildAid, Save the Elephants and the African Wildlife Foundation recently announced an anti-ivory television campaign to air in 2014 featuring American actor Edward Norton, Chinese starlet Li Bingbing, and a number of basketball greats including Congo’s Dikembe Mutombo, former Chinese Olympian Yao Ming, and current NBA player, Jeremy Lin.
The full article appears in Issue 217 of The Big Issue – on sale now to 24 March, 2014. Buy a copy today!
And you can read more about it on The Big Issue website
