News — elephants

There are hearings on October 8. Ask them to oppose the bill, HR 2406, which would overturn rules against illegal ivory trade and elephant poaching. This bad bill will also allow polar bear trophies to be imported, and it will prevent rules against lead ammunition that poisons birds. Support Rep Grijalva's amendment to protect elephants. LINK

Details of Obama's proposed regs to ban ivory trade. link

"Ivory belongs to elephants only" is the message of African natives who march and protest. "Please be our protector. Please deliver us from evil" is the imagined cry of the elephants. some good news: Daphne Sheldrick and a team of supporters have been rescuing orphaned baby elephants. A British zoology professor, Lee White, left studying elephants and moved to Gabon to protect them. He leads 250 army rangers in protecting 13 national parks. President Obama's recent rule change will ban interstate sales of elephant ivory across state lines. He also will use the intelligence agencies to target the $20 billion illegal wildlife trade. link

Community conservancies provide jobs as rangers and income to poor local people. Then the clans protect the elephants. Elephants are being killed faster than they can reproduce. Their range has decreased from 3 million square miles in 1978 to 1 million square miles in 2007. The Russian mob, Irish organized gangs, the Chinese mafia, and African and Asian gangs control the $ 188 million per year illegal ivory trade. This is part of the huge, $ 19 Billion per year illegal trade in plants and animals: illicit timber, animals, birds, rhino horns, animal pelts, .... There are many good groups working to save elephants: the Environmental Investigation Agency, Born Free USA, Wildllfe Direct, Save the Elephants, the park and wildlife wardens, Kenya's Northern Rangelands Trust (that do the community conservancies), the International Fund for Animal Welfare, WWF's TRAFFIC, the Project for the Application of Law for Fauna, Wildlife Direct, Maisha Consulting, ConflictArmament, C4ADS, Wildlife Conservation Society, WWF, Elephant Listening Project, Global Witness, Eagle Wildlife Law Enforcement, the Max Planck Institute, and Greenpeace. link ( some of the groups come from the other articles: New Yorker and Earth Island.)

Only a few thousand forest elephants remain in the Central African Republic. 62 % of them were killed and they lost one third of their range between 2002 and 2011. Peter Canby wrote in the New Yorker about Andrea Turkalo, a biologist who has observed them for years. Activists, groups, game wardens, and researchers try to protect the elephants. Militias and armed gangs poach them to sell to Chinese profiteers. Chinese logging companies log the buffers around the parks, and the logging roads and trade in conflict timber to China allow the poachers to get access to the elephants and to export the ivory. link

link to article on how ivory is smuggled from Africa to China and Hong Kong via Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Burma.