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
MATTHEW SCULLY
JUN 6 2013, 9:15 AM ET
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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)
"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
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.
Unless Western and African nations can
turn things around fast, in order to
protect the 400,000 or so left, then the
elephants of Africa, pretty much all of
them, will soon be gone.
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."
GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons poses next to an elephant he killed in Zimbabwe.
(YouTube)
You could argue, I suppose, that a lot of low-lifes killing a lot
of animals isn't news. Some pretty ruthless practices are
tolerated, even licensed, here in America. And as for the
aerial gunning from helicopters, if we're going to be objective
about it, maybe the poachers have been studying the wolfmanagement techniques of Alaska Fish and Game.
Recall, too, that not every crack of a gun the elephants hear
comes from poachers. The model that advocates of legalizing
the ivory trade like to cite is Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe,
wherein usually captive elephants, giraffes, lions, hippos,
and other animals -- baited and with slender chance of
escape -- are shot in reserves that are essentially big-game
trophy farms. For a few snapshots of the "harvest" -- a
euphemism that sport hunters these days understandably
prefer -- search the names Kenneth Behring, Bob Parsons,
and Eric and Donald Trump, Jr. They are among thousands
of Americans and Europeans who venture off each year to
Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, or South Africa to
slay the ultimate prize of the sportsman's "Big Five" -- guided
by professional trackers, guaranteed an easy kill, possessed
by an obsession that even most hunters regard with disgust.
They offer philanthropic-sounding pretexts -- it's all about
"conservation" -- in the timeless way of Africa's exploiters:
They big-heartedly "donate the meat" of an elephant carcass,
as if devouring it all by themselves were an option. They
rushed in, from across the Atlantic, to save a village from
"rogue elephants." Uncannily, the rogues are always the ones
with the biggest "trophy tusks," marked and even advertised
for hunting well in advance of the hero's arrival.
It is the "imbecile rapacity" of ivory
hunters, as Joseph Conrad described the
condition in The Heart of Darkness, that
has led to this last stand of the African
elephants.
Even if our sole concern were ivory hunting, these people
aren't clean. Safari Club International, a 55,000-member
outfit based in Tucson that promotes competitive trophy
hunting worldwide, cites some "indirect benefits" and
"downstream activities" of sportive elephant hunting to
"ivory manufacturers, etc." The professional trackers who
escort Safari Club members around forest and savannah
require, we're told, training that involves killing a few
elephants just for practice, and apparently that ivory is left
there for the taking. The group's position is further explained
in a paper issued under the guise of being an "educational"
and indeed "humanitarian" organization, a tax-exempt,
charitable status actually granted to the Safari Club
Foundation by the Internal Revenue Service. Under the
catchy title "Ivory Accumulation and Disposal in Zimbabwe,"
we learn that "ivory is a gift of nature"; it's a "resource," and
"every country has the right to use their natural resources to
their best advantage. ... Africa has few advantages. Ivory is
one of them."
Note to the IRS: Forget the Tea Party groups and have a look
at these people. Their point here seems to be that rich
American trophy hunters and their guides will gladly add a
few tusks to the pile, gratis. It sounds like a "gift," all right.
They'll help on the "accumulation" end of things, and leave
disposal to the best judgment of wildlife officials in
Zimbabwe -- a notorious supplier of ivory to China. It's all no
doubt legal, and it certainly squares with the ethical
standards of the Mugabe regime.
What are the ivory "status symbols" everybody's so wild to
grab in China, anyway, but "trophies" by another name? In
your typical Chinese ivory boutique, Alex Shoumatoff tells us
in Vanity Fair, "the main consumers are middle-aged men
who have just made it into the middle class and are eager to
flaunt their ability to make expensive discretionary
purchases. Beautiful ivory carvings are traditional symbols of
wealth and status." That's half the room at Safari Club
banquets, with the difference that there is no confusion
among these collectors about just how the status symbol was
obtained. They saw the terrified animal, they heard the roars
and cries themselves, and they're already booked to go back
for more.
Recreational elephant hunters are, if anything, only more
contemptible than the ivory poachers for lacking anything
even resembling a rational motive. They frighten and kill for
the malicious pleasure of it, even as all the "jumbos" and "big
tuskers," in the inane vernacular of safari journals, vanish
from the earth -- and, indeed, as all of the Big Five near the
Big Zero. An Internet search will turn up pictures of them
posing and grinning next to the elephants they shot, and in
the case of Bob Parsons, then CEO of GoDaddy.com, a video
record of his hunt in Zimbabwe, showing how this particular
humanitarian lay in wait for the hungry bull to come for
food. The man had just made a billion dollars from his
company, and what better way to celebrate one's own good
fortune in life than to go out and kill something? Something
big, to suit the occasion. The pictures are all part of the thrill,
the pornography of bloodlust, and trophy hunters actually
post this evidence themselves, never getting quite the
reaction they expected from normal, sane people. An
impartial observer from Africa or China, hearing Americans
condemn the ivory poachers and traders, would be entitled
to state as a rule that if their creeps can't kill elephants for
trinkets, our creeps can't kill them for trophies.
Mostly, though, for all of the ones "conserved" via the
taxidermy shop, it is the "imbecile rapacity" of ivory hunters,
as Joseph Conrad described the condition in The Heart of
Darkness, that has led to this last stand of the African
elephants. And their ordeal seems like a larger event in the
life of the world, ecologically and morally, than media
coverage and commentary here in America would suggest. In
Africa, champions of the elephants convey a despairing sense
that not enough Americans are paying attention. You have to
spend a while on YouTube to learn that in African villages
and cities there have been protests and marches, with large
crowds and banners declaring, "Ivory Belongs to Elephants
Only." All the while, a cable news viewer in America could be
excused for thinking that the only development of note out of
Africa lately is that a celebrity track star in Johannesburg has
been charged with murdering his model girlfriend.
Parsons, come to think of it, did rate quite a bit of on-air
discussion in March of 2011 when his video hit the Internet.
But if one man's mayhem at the expense of one elephant is
news, why isn't continental mayhem at the expense of all of
them? American news producers, if they're following the
crisis at all, perhaps wave it off as just too confusing and
depressing -- and, well, so 1980s. We can expect elegiac, twominute segments ten years from now on "The Last
Elephant." Why not get on the story right now, while it might
still do some good?
It's striking as well how little we hear of this epic crime
against nature from environmentalist groups in America that
used to be associated with such causes, and even began with
such causes. There are a few, and lately they've enlisted some
star power to try helping the elephants -- including, to their
great credit, actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Kristen Davis,
and a Chinese starlet named Li Bingbing. But mostly the
causes of various animals, even the more "charismatic" ones,
have fallen out of fashion, shifting over to smaller welfare
groups specifically devoted to their protection. If the
elephants' defenders in Africa have been trying to find
influential allies here who might help draw attention to the
emergency, it's not getting through.
Somewhere along the way, our modern environmental
movement took on an impersonal, abstract mindset, more
about "habitat" than animals, and so fixated on broader
economic agendas as to lose its basic moral vision as
guardian of our fellow creatures in the here and now.
Protecting animals from vicious people and reckless
industries wasn't enough anymore. Economies had to be
redirected, paradigms shifted, structural transformations of
one kind or another set in motion. It's all carbon, all the
time, and for all of the movement's alarmism on other fronts,
somehow the end days of the earth's largest land animal has
gone practically unremarked. Habitat without animals is just
backdrop, quiet of life and morally meaningless.
Environmentalism, without animal protection in the
foreground, is just an argument about aesthetics and
consumer rights. It's cheap nature worship, about us and not
really about the world around us. I'm all for going green, but
as a rallying cry it lacks something. "We lightened our carbon
footprint," as a measure of virtue and moral endeavor, just
doesn't have the solid, selfless ring of "We saved the
elephants."
Then, too, whenever the travails of any African animal are
offered as a serious public concern, there's always someone
who thinks we all need reminding that great, too, is the
human suffering there, and so why on earth are we so
concerned about Africa's animals? The objection, for one
thing, attempts to give a high-minded ring to an evasion of
human responsibility. This is suffering of human agency,
these are man-made miseries on a grievous scale, and that is
always sufficient reason to stop the wrongdoers and protect
the victims. Listen carefully to such criticisms, moreover -lately offered under the prissy heading of Human
Exceptionalism -- and you'll notice they are rarely arguments
saying that we should do more for other humanitarian causes
in Africa: more for the afflicted of Darfur, more for the
victims of AIDS, more to reform our country's own food aid
so that it serves African farmers instead of just American
agribusiness, and so on. Mostly, they're just arguments for
doing nothing about the elephants, or whatever, as if it is
somehow offensive in principle to advocate all of these
causes simultaneously. The complaint is a form of moral
preening, more "exceptional" than human, and more
irrelevant than ever at a time when Africans themselves are
seeking our help, and when -- as we have learned in recent
years -- their worst enemies and ours are profiting from the
massacre of the elephants. You might say, again to borrow
from Pope Francis, that helping afflicted humans and
animals alike all has to do with "the advance of this world."
***
All of this is, in any case, a very big deal, requiring our
concentrated consideration, and involving no agenda but our
duties to creatures who deserve far better than this fate.
After millions of years sharing the earth with us, is this really
how it must end for the elephants of Africa, to be frantically
rushing in darkness for the few safe zones left, until even
those are gone? For all of them to die in sinful slaughter,
until the butchers have found the last one, and the last tusk
is smuggled off to China?
Those recent reports about the poaching trade, revealing just
who is doing the killing and who is being enriched, require
our attention whether we are inclined to give it or not. In
daring and exemplary coverage, New York Times
correspondents Jeffrey Gettleman and Dan Levin have gone
beyond the death counts and mournful commentaries to
reveal exactly what the elephants and their defenders are up
against. The Times series reads in stretches like some
National Security Council document prepared for a select
few, filled with all the foul characters and shadowy networks
that an Asian craze for ivory has loosed upon the continent.
A dispatch by Gettlemen from the Republic of Congo last
September explains, among much else, the presence of those
Arabic-speaking guys who turned Kalashnikovs on the herd
in Chad (and then, in a detail I almost wish National
Geographic had spared us, prostrated themselves in prayer
to Allah):
Some of Africa's most notorious armed groups, including the
Lord's Resistance Army, the Shabab and Darfur's Janjaweed,
are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy
weapons and sustain their mayhem. Organized crime
syndicates are linking up with them to move the ivory
around the world, exploiting turbulent states, porous borders
and corrupt officials from sub-Saharan Africa to China ....
Al-Shabab is the Somali wing of al-Qaeda, so they figure in
all of this too, right along with the army of Joseph Kony,
whose enslavement of women and children across central
Africa has made him a target of American special forces, and
with the Janjaweed militiamen whose campaign of rape and
genocide in Darfur earned them the name "devils on
horseback."
Hillary Clinton, when she traveled to Africa as secretary of
state last summer, was "quite alarmed" by what she heard.
"Local leaders are telling their national leaders that they can
lose control of large swaths of territory to these criminal
gangs." Her successor, Secretary John Kerry, needs no
briefing on the crisis. Poachers, he warned in a Senate
hearing last year, "operate in remote territories and cross
borders with impunity, wreaking havoc on villages and
families. Increasingly, criminal gangs and militias are wiping
out entire herds and killing anyone who gets in their way."
Then we have evidence of cooperation by officials of the
Congolese, South Sudanese, and Ugandan armies -- in the
latter case, to the point of actually providing aerial support to
poachers. The Ugandan military, which receives many
millions of dollars in financial and logistical support from
the United States, has apparently supplied some of those
helicopters from which the slayers search and destroy. We're
helping them, and they're helping the poachers.
Our ambassador to Kenya noted last year, in a cable posted
on WikiLeaks, "a marked increase in poaching wherever
Chinese labor camps [are] located." There are more than a
million Chinese nationals residing in Africa. Some 400
Chinese companies operate in Kenya. "Poaching has risen
sharply in areas where the Chinese are building roads," as
Kenya's director of Wildlife Services, Julius Kipng'etich, told
the Telegraph in 2011. "Is that a coincidence? Ninety percent
of the ivory confiscated at Nairobi airport is in Chinese
luggage. Some Chinese say we are being racist, but our
sniffer dogs are not racist."
The Ugandan military, which receives
millions in financial and logistical
support from the United States, has
apparently supplied some helicopters
from which the elephant slayers search
and destroy.
Kenya has long banned hunting of any kind, with
comparatively healthy herds and annual tourism revenue
above $1 billion -- employing more people than all but one
industry -- to show for it, until the Chinese companies
arrived. As in other range states, these foreign firms are
mostly extractive enterprises in the hinterlands, where the
elephants are. They clear a path for poachers and provide
cover for the smugglers. The way it works is that a Chinese
broker shows up in the village, places the order with
poachers, and then returns a few days later to pay the killers
and collect the tusks.
Here, too, we are sometimes cautioned not to sentimentalize
animals, and in the case of poaching to think of the
desperation that must lead a man to do such a thing. The real
temptation is to sentimentalize the poachers, in a waste of
empathy that libels the many poor people in Africa who are
trying to protect the elephants. And here's a cure for that,
courtesy of National Public Radio reporter John Burnett,
who spoke to some poachers this year, including one named
Mkanga:
Scientists tell us that elephants have death rituals. They will,
for instance, cluster around a dead individual and touch the
carcass with their trunks, and then return much later to
caress the bones. Mkanga, the first poacher, is asked if he
knows that elephants mourn their dead. He shifts in his
chair, adjusts his Safari Beer cap, and smirks. "Sometimes
when they have a funeral, it's like a party for me," he says.
"You shoot one, and before he dies the others come to mourn
for the one who is injured. And so I kill another one, and kill
another one."
They aim for the legs, to cripple the elephants first, or in
large-scale attacks fire indiscriminately into the herd.
Invariably, investigators find evidence that tusks, reaching
deep into the skull, have been cut out before some of the
creatures were even dead. The poachers often leave poison
on the carcasses, to kill the vultures whose swirling above
might alert rangers. Sometimes they poison the elephants,
with laced pumpkins or watermelons set out before the
attack, or with poisoned arrows, or nails on boards laid in the
brush that prolong the agony but muffle the noise.
Dan Levin, reporting for the Times in March, picks up the
trail in China, with details about trafficking, bribery at every
turn, hollow laws and international sanctions, the
insufferable self-regard of the carvers and collectors ("Love
for ivory is in our blood"), shoppers browsing for just the
right bracelet or chopsticks ("As long as the quality of the
ivory is good, who cares what happened to the elephant?"),
the smuggling rings, the Thai and Vietnamese underworlds,
the Chinese mafia, the People's Liberation Army, and on and
on.
Enough to say that if a species can be judged by its enemies,
then the elephants deserve mercy on that account alone. Just
about every bad actor in Africa and Asia seems to have a
hand in it. There are more vital causes in this world, even
among causes of mercy. But rarely will you find so much
depravity converging on such innocence.
After ages in our midst, the most powerful of creatures and
among the most gentle, so completely unoffending and yet so
endlessly persecuted, here comes the final annihilation.
Their extinction will be a joint venture, in essence, of the
Beijing Ivory Carving Factory with the Janjaweed and Lord's
Resistance Army. The common poacher has fallen in with the
militant poacher, in service to unbridled human vanity.
Avarice has allied with motives even more malevolent to
finish them off, in a vast criminal enterprise that often uses
their misery to fund still more atrocities against people, a
great chain of greed from Sudan to Shanghai.
Malaysian customs officers show elephant tusks which were recently seized in
Port Klang outside Kuala Lumpur on December 11, 2012. (Bazuki
Muhammad/Reuters)
I have always thought the trumpeting of an elephant among
the finest sounds in all Creation, their calls of fear and rage
among the hardest to bear. Only in the last 25 or so years
have we learned the full range of their acoustical repertoire,
including roars and rumbles that are but the overtones of a
pitch too low for human hearing, infrasonic calls carrying
messages of welcome, warning, and who knows what else to
other elephants even miles across the forest or savannah. A
few experts, after years in their company, can interpret these
sounds. I claim no such knowledge of elephants, but I am
certain of this. If one of those messages could reach us now,
all of their well-wishers across the world, and we could put
words to the sounds, the meaning would be as simple and
universal as that message from the new Pope: Please, be our
protectors. Please, deliver us from this evil.
Elephants are what ecologists call a
"keystone" species, a giant force in
nature whose fortunes affect everything
around them -- for good, or ill.
For the leadership of Western nations, surely the key is this:
Because so many wicked causes are today served by killing
elephants, exactly that many good causes are served by
helping them. The only upside to being a magnet for every
devil in Africa is that it gives the rest of the world, if we are
all thinking straight, a powerful incentive to come to your
defense, even at this late hour.
Elephants are a "keystone" species, as the ecologists say, a
giant force in nature whose fortunes affect everything around
them for good or ill, and it turns out something similar is
true of their place in the security environment. When we
help them, we help so many others who suffer at the same
hands. When we and our allies help troubled states to protect
elephants, we're making them more stable nations, better
able to protect themselves from other threats as well. And
when, in the case of the central states, armies of thugs,
rapists, human traffickers, and terrorists including a cell of
al-Qaeda, are getting their money from the extermination of
the elephants and the sale of ivory, it is in our urgent interest
to stop them, and bring an end to the whole filthy business.
"We can beat the poachers," a senior ranger in Gabon named
Joseph Okouyi told the London Daily Mail, "but we have to
end the demand in China and we need better logistics with
more camps, more planes, more boats." Some Western
policymakers, pressed by other concerns, may still view it all
as hopeless, because the corruption runs so deep, the lines of
force seem to favor the enemy, and, it is said, market
demand will always find a way. But if Okouyi, a man facing
fierce battle with the worst of the worst in Africa, believes the
cause isn't lost, then who are politicians and diplomats to say
otherwise?
The relevant diplomats work their various purposes through
the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES. This Genevabased organization consists of 178 nations, the "Parties," that
are legally bound to its rules, or, at least, obliged to honor
"requests" and "recommendations" to please observe those
rules. It regulates wildlife-related commerce among nations,
according to the "appendix" status assigned to each listed
species. Whenever you read about elephants and ivory,
CITES will be somewhere in the story.
In practice, CITES operates a lot like the UN itself at its most
helpless, so that the principal offenders have equal voice and
everybody else, to conduct any business at all, has to pretend
that one and all are in sincere pursuit of the same lofty
objectives. CITES proceeds, no matter what the crisis, at the
pace of international officialdom: Appeals are made to the
Parties to develop and implement action plans for the further
study of agenda items that are in due course submitted to the
Standing Committee for prompt referral to the Plenary and
forwarding for review to the Secretariat, and then everyone
calls it a day. The group convened not long ago in Bangkok.
Shruti Suresh of the Environmental Investigative Agency, a
British NGO, gives a nice summary of how things went:
"Gripping speeches were delivered about the elephant
poaching crisis ... 'organised crime' and the need for 'timebound measurable action' to stop the killing and the illegal
trade in ivory. ... Throughout the proceedings, there was one
word that was avoided like the plague by the Parties -'China.'"
It can all get very involved, but the upshot is this. CITES in
1989 transferred the African elephant from Appendix II to
Appendix I. Appendix I, if you're fauna and people are trying
to kill you, is where you want to be -- protected. Asian
elephants landed there in 1975, and though they've had their
share of misfortune, on the commercial-trade front this
status did them a lot of good.
To see the difference that Appendix I could make, one had
only look at their "de-listed" kin in African from 1975 to
1989, doomed on more than one occasion by CITES itself.
For a time, in the 1980's, this organization and the man who
ran it were prime movers in the mass hunting and culling of
elephants. In South Africa and elsewhere, hundreds of
thousands of the creatures were wiped out, in scenes you
could set beside last year's Cameroon slaughter of hundreds
by the Janjaweed without knowing the difference.
The secretary general in that era was Eugene Lapointe, a
puzzling figure in the realm of wildlife protection who made
a quick exit in 1989 after Time revealed his close connections
to the Japanese Ivory Association. Lapointe then devoted
himself -- again in collaboration with Japanese interests -- to
the cause of delisting both elephants and whales back to
lowly Appendix II, so that still more could be hunted without
onerous obstacles like "endangered" and "near-extinct"
status getting in the way. He seems to have it in for the
"charismatic mega-fauna" in particular, as if the special
regard and empathy that people feel for these animals makes
it only more urgent that they be destroyed. I interviewed
Lapointe once, in 2000, and still remember the utter disdain
with which he brushed off the "sentimentality" of protection
efforts: all this "propaganda about elephants -- elephants
being shot and the calf nearby making noises and so forth. ...
It's for their own good, to be hunted and used" -- a rule "
suffering no exceptions." He is the only man I have ever met
who spoke with hatred for elephants. And this is the guy who
ran CITES for nine years.
The Stalinesque stewardship of Lapointe prepared the way
for the great reprieve of 1990. The mass slaughter was so
god-awful as to rate, in June of 1989, the presidential
intervention of George Bush, who unilaterally banned ivory
imports into the United States -- because otherwise, he said,
"the wild elephant will soon be lost from this earth." Within a
week Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did the same in the
United Kingdom, setting in motion an international ban by
CITES that took effect in January. It was still legal to sell
existing, worked ivory domestically, but you had to be
careful, and the ban was such a big deal that every
prospective ivory buyer, high-end merchant, and pawn-shop
owner in the civilized world understood that new ivory was
forbidden, tainted, and its sale or purchase a punishable
offense. Demand was almost gone, enough for elephant
populations to stabilize. There was carnage but not mayhem,
which in the elephant world is progress.
Then, in 2008, at the initiative chiefly of delegates from
China and Japan, CITES approved a "one-off" sale of ivory
from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
Some 102 tons of tusks, taken from smugglers or from
cullings, was just stacked there in guarded warehouses, and
why let it all go to waste? President Mugabe, enforcing his
credo that elephants must "pay their own way" with ivory
and trophies, was a big player in all of this. In 1999, at the
tyrant's insistence, there had been a one-off ivory sale of fifty
tons to Japan as an "experiment." Since 2008, other nations
including Zimbabwe have received the go-ahead for one-off
sales. You have to be burrowed deep into the bureaucratic
workings of CITES, as each new sale in turn is authorized,
not to look up and wonder why everyone still calls them
"one-off."
The theory in 2008 was that ivory from elephants already
killed would satiate demand, drive down prices, and thereby
afford a buffer to elephants still alive. It overlooked a few
problems, and the most fatal blunder, as Bryan Christy notes
in National Geographic, was a failure to see the difference
between "experimenting" in Japan, foolish as that was, and
inviting a great reawakening of demand in China -- a country
with 14 international borders, thousands of miles of
coastline, 10 times the population of Japan, and the world's
fastest-growing economy.
With the CITES secretary general himself overseeing the
auction of tusks, it was one of those news-in-brief items out
of Africa that nobody even remembers when the full
catastrophe unfolds, and the understandable reaction today
is to wonder, "Wasn't ivory banned years ago?" Suddenly it
was for sale again, and who was to say whether the goods
were new or old?
On top of that, state enterprises in China promptly rigged the
market. In the auctions, they acquired the raw ivory at
artificially low prices (aided, as Dr. Meng Xianlin, China's
lead delegate to CITES, confessed recently to Bryan Christy,
by collusion between Japanese and Chinese bidders). Now
they sell it at artificially high prices, parceling out five tons a
year while restricting buyers to Chinese carving factories. So
the "legal" stuff is twice the value of what the black-market
stuff was in 2008. And the black-market stuff is cheaper than
the licit stuff. The combined efforts of Chinese
"businessmen" in the African hinterlands, village riff-raff,
bought border guards, faithless politicians, warlords, wildlife
traffickers, terrorists, and criminal gangs can offer buyers a
better deal than Beijing's monopoly will offer, thus inviting
the poaching frenzy. To add one further absurdity to this
dynamic: even as the newly prosperous of China buy ivory
products to strut their affluence, everybody involved is still
trying to shave a few yuan off the price tag.
Chinese authorities do, on occasion, catch smugglers, and
one needn't always assume the worst about them. An ad
campaign by WildAid and Save the Elephants is underway in
China, with the former Houston Rockets basketball star Yao
Ming as spokesman. "An ivory carving is thousands of miles
removed from the sad carcass of a poached elephant," writes
Ming, "but we need to make that connection. . . . Would
anyone buy ivory if they had witnessed this?" It's a tough sell
to people who still haven't made a lot of other connections: a
land of 1.3 billion that still has no anti-cruelty laws, tolerates
the pitiless confinement Asiatic bears farmed for their bile,
shows little sentiment for victims caught up in the dog-meat
trade, regards the consumption of wildlife, caught or farmed,
as normal, and besides all that is ruled by a government
that's pretty rough with its own people when they step out of
line. Yet there are also the stirrings of a humane movement
in China, with younger citizens like Yao Ming showing the
way, and what an excellent use for this man to make of his
own new wealth and stature.
A rule of thumb regarding all the
world's ivory would be to leave it where
it is, above all if it is still in the jaws of
an elephant, and in the case of
stockpiled tusks to follow the example
of Kenya after the first ban and of
Gabon just last year: Burn it all.
When Chinese authorities confiscate the raw ivory, in any
event, even that gets dumped into the market in sales at a
profit to domestic traders. It hasn't occurred to whatever
People's Committee decided this policy that the arrangement
only makes the smugglers, in effect, ivory couriers working
for the government of China. Every last carver and collector,
moreover, protests that he or she deals only in legal material
predating the worldwide ban. New ivory, fresh off the range
states, gets laundered with phony documents. Forging "preban" certificates has become an esteemed craft all by itself.
"Like the forest canopy that protects poachers from
detection," writes Levin in the Times, "the regulated ivory
trade has provided unscrupulous Chinese carvers and
collectors with the ideal legal camouflage to buy and sell
contraband tusks."
Leaving aside the question of whether, at this point, there is
any such thing as a scrupulous ivory dealer, what matters is
that there be no dealers at all. As long as any ivory can be
legally bought or sold, resourceful people will keep the new
stuff coming and palm it off as legitimate. A master carver
named Zhou Bai, interviewed by Levin, states the matter
plainly, although of course he thinks it's all just wonderful.
"'When the ban was passed ... I was sad this art would die
with me,' said Zhou, who was busy turning a three-foot-long
tusk into a fanciful temple surrounded by clouds. 'But now
we have the opportunity to keep it alive.'"
Only vanity at its most self-absorbed could sacrifice an
elephant for an ivory temple, trading so perfect a creature for
a little idol of one's own making -- in Zhou's case, a piece
only more pathetic for its supposedly pious inspiration. But
the man's got one thing right: Either the art dies, or the
elephants die. And, though the master would have it
otherwise, most of us would prefer a farewell to the art.
"The alarm bells are ringing," as Kenya's Julius Kipng'etich
told the Telegraph. "We will tell CITES: 'Look what you have
triggered with your one-off sales. You must ban the ivory
trade." Of course he is right, only this time the ban must be
unequivocal, all-encompassing, and permanent. There must
be no such thing -- anywhere, and starting in America -- as
the legal sale of ivory. A rule of thumb regarding all the
world's ivory would be to leave it where it is, above all if it is
still in the jaws of an elephant, and in the case of stockpiled
tusks to follow the example of Kenya after the first ban and
of Gabon just last year: Burn it all.
"In the middle of this field was this huge pile of ivory tusks
all stacked up on a pyre," as one observer described the
moment in Libreville, where Gabon President Ali Bongo put
the match to it himself. "It's sending up a torch or beacon to
the rest of the world." That is how serious people dispose of
serious threats, at no more loss to Gabon or to mankind than
a ton of cocaine heaped into the incinerator, and what a
contrast to CITES with its ivory auctioneering, appeasement,
and consistent refusal to make the one "recommendation"
that would really matter: restrictions on the trading
privileges of every offender.
If we can assume anything about Chinese authorities,
national and local, it is that when the orders from Beijing are
unequivocal, they know how to police a situation. And
assured access to each others' markets is the very incentive
built into CITES' original design - the instrument of its
authority, if it has any at all. The prospect of sanctions came
up the last time around, when, as the Bangkok Post
recounts, the conference identified three African nations,
Along with transit countries Malaysia, the Philippines and
Vietnam, and top markets China and Thailand - as making
insufficient efforts to curb the trade. But they avoided
punishment after six of them submitted draft action plans in
response and China and Tanzania committed to do so by a
specific date. ... CITES general secretary John Scanlon said
such measures were a "last resort" and should only be
imposed "where there's a clear failure to comply and no
intention to comply."
Give them some dashed-off paper or "draft action plan" at
CITES and it buys you another year. Why would these
chronic offenders themselves even be asked to do the
drafting and planning? Isn't that what the whole
organization and treaty are for? Aren't "intention" and
performance usually related, so that after years of the same
results the intention may be surmised from the noncompliance? And with another ninety or more elephants
hitting the dust every day, isn't this exactly the time for a
"last resort"?
Kenya Wildlife Service officials carry recovered elephants tusks and illegally held
firearms from poachers at their headquarters in Nairobi on June 22, 2012.
(Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)
What is happening now to entire herds is just the final
onslaught, brought on as much by irresolute people of good
intent as by corrupt people of evil intent, a story these poor
creatures are hardly the first to play out. "A plaint of guiltless
hurt doth pierce the sky," and the Standing Committee is still
waiting on first drafts of a plan to do anything about it.
"How shockingly destructive and
historically shameful it would be,"
Secretary Kerry said last year, "if we did
nothing while a great species was
criminally slaughtered into extinction."
As an extension of the UN, CITES would have, one would
think, some sway in New York. Yet in Bangkok, when
somebody had the half-decent idea of taking the problem of
poaching by terrorists before the UN Security Council, that
didn't get far either. They won't even use what little influence
they have. As for the organization's credibility, that moved
fast when the bidding started.
To turns things around now will take bigger forces. It will
take real power, decisions that count, laws with force, and an
audience that listens. So ask yourself this, especially if you're
a proud environmentalist and voted last November for the
candidate who said he is too: If America, 24 years ago, could
take the lead under a Republican president, why can't we do
it again now under a Democratic president?
It's hard for anyone, much less for a president, to think fresh
about a problem so perennial and unpleasant, to clear the
mind of the tawdry particulars and find a straight path to
what is ultimately a fairly simple objective. But to give it a
try, start with Japan.
Often in the ivory debate, when it comes to solutions, it is
said that we just have to "put pressure on China," as if this
were an uncomplicated proposition. Yet how are American
diplomats to prevail on China, a creditor of the United States
and at times a rival, to cooperate in this effort when our
closest ally in the region is, basically, one of the bad actors?
Like Thailand and other friends, Japan has become a
gateway for the trafficking in wildlife of every variety, living
and dead, "from turtles to tigers" as Scientific American puts
it. Demand for "traditional East Asian remedies" is clearing
Africa of animal life, all to feed nothing but the delusions of
people who are certain that bear claws will ease their
arthritis, expect lion viscera to solve their impotence, or -- in
the delicate phrasing of our state department -- believe
"unsubstantiated claims of the rhino horn as a cure for
cancer." Secretary Clinton detailed trafficking issues in a
speech last year, and in just about every case -- the whole
pillaging of Africa, to say nothing of Japan's slaughter of
dolphins and willful, deceitful hunting of whales even as we
and other nations seek to protect those creatures -- Japanese
authorities figure prominently in the problem.
America itself was once the world's largest market for ivory,
and we still have a busy retail market for it that goes casually
policed. Yet for nearly a quarter century, we have at least
sought to make amends by pursuing the honorable and
unselfish objective of curtailing ivory and sparing the African
elephant from extinction. Ultimately, there's nothing in it for
us. It's just one of things we do for its own sake, and happily
most our friends in the world feel the same. We can't count
on Japan to help us? Why, time after time in these matters,
are they lining up with China instead of with America?
You could counter that Japan is a vital ally in a dangerous
region -- North Korea over here, China over there, and a
general situation we're all aware of -- and so we have much
bigger things to worry about in our dealings with them than
their complicity in the undoing of the world's wildlife. But
why doesn't that same point work in reverse -- that the
government of Japan has much bigger business with us, and
therefore should not constantly work to cross purposes in
matters that we, at least, think important enough to put a lot
on the line for? All the more because China is a strategic
concern, and America the nation that to this day underwrites
the security of the Island of Japan, it would not seem to be
asking too much that Japanese leaders help us in a benign
and, by the standards of high diplomacy, fairly innocuous
matter like keeping ivory off the market and holding the line
at CITES.
It is surely a rule of diplomacy that before you approach a
great power with which you have a difference, you've got to
know your friends are with you. And at the next opportunity,
Secretary Kerry would be within his rights to say that he and
the president who sent him expect that of Japan going
forward. They need to trust us on this one, as do Taiwan,
Thailand, the Philippines and every other friendly or
dependent government in the Asia-Pacific region, and more
"promising steps" such as Secretary Clinton noted last
November aren't going to cut it. Her team, she said, had "met
with African and Asian leaders to discuss the immediate
actions needed to thwart poachers," and "next week,
President Obama and I will personally bring this message to
our partners in ASEAN and the East Asia Summit."
Doubtless they did. But the message doesn't seem to have
taken, because in Bangkok a few months later there was not
the least sign of unity. In what passes for drama at CITES,
Thailand's Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, declared
that she would consider reforming Thai law to regulate the
ivory trade, in terms to be defined on some unspecified
future date.
In the most emphatic, precise language -- no more "urging"
and "calling on" them -- all of these governments need to
hear that this cause really matters to our country, and
regardless of Asian traditions surrounding ivory, the
American government will be counting on their support on
every front to end the ivory trade. "How shockingly
destructive and historically shameful it would be," Secretary
Kerry said last year, "if we did nothing while a great species
was criminally slaughtered into extinction." Tell them that
and more, until they understand that the use of ivory, like
foot-binding and other ignoble traditions mercifully
abandoned, has to end. They are great and advanced nations;
now, in the treatment of animals, they need to start acting
like civilized nations, and so, in other respects, do we.
Let the elephants be a "keystone" here, too, the focal point of
a larger effort. Cast a wide, strong net for ivory dealers
throughout Asia, and all kinds of other miscreants will be
dragged in as well, including traffickers in weapons and
narcotics. Relentless policing of smugglers; grave penalties
for offenses; fast-lane prosecution of any official abetting the
trade; a shutdown of domestic retail markets found with
ivory, down to the smallest curio shop; widely aired ad
campaigns in their countries, like that of Yao Ming in China,
to show the real cost of ivory; and votes at CITES and at the
UN consistent with all of this: These verifiable, immediate
steps by our friends across the Asia-Pacific region should be
taken as the signs of cooperation, no vague assurances or
"draft action plans" accepted in their place.
***
I once had the experience of being in Adelaide, Australia,
watching our American delegation to the International
Whaling Commission -- basically, the CITES for whales -contending for days with Japanese delegates, unsuccessfully,
to get any slight concession on the hunting of whales. In
theory our delegation represents the views and wishes of the
president of the United States, who appoints its chief
delegate, but at far-off conferences, against the harangues of
tireless, troublesome adversaries, those views and wishes
lose a good deal of their force. A few years later, as it turned
out, I found myself in the West Wing of the White House
when the subject of whaling by Japan and Norway happened
to come up, and a figure of some influence around there
remarked, "There is no reason why anyone in the year 2003
needs to be killing whales," going on to explain why that was
so. Such clarity, the best instincts of those at the top, could
save our diplomats a lot of trouble on the whaling issue, and
it's the same with the fate of the elephants.
As a speechwriter, I also traveled with President George W.
Bush to Japan, South Korea, and China, as well as to
Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, and Nigeria. And I noticed
something that's probably similar in the Obama years as
well. The policy aides all cared about wildlife issues, and
ivory in particular, but they acted, even during these travels,
on the assumption that none it was really vital enough to rate
direct presidential attention. It all got sorted out at lower
levels, leaving foreign counterparts to draw logical
conclusions about its importance to us, and, by neglect,
perhaps hastening the unraveling of conditions in Africa.
It's just possible that these things keep unraveling exactly
because they are not handled at the top. And who is better
suited to take on the crisis? It's hard to believe that an
American president with a solid environmentalist
constituency, a foreign-policy emphasis on Asia and Africa,
some boyhood years spent in Southeast Asia (at Jakarta's St.
Francis of Assisi School), and doubtless an abhorrence for
cruelty of any kind, would not have convictions and practical
ideas of his own about how to avoid such vast suffering
among the people and creatures in the land of his father's
birth.
In Dreams from My Father, the president recalled how his
Kenyan sister, when he first went to that country in the late
1980s, "grimaced and shook her head" when he expressed a
desire to see the wildlife parks. She viewed them as a vestige
of colonial days, an indulgence for white tourists who came
to the continent to photograph the animals without noticing
much else: "These wazunga care more about one dead
elephant than they do for a hundred black children." Obama
told her "she was letting other people's attitudes prevent her
from seeing her own country," and the book has some lovely
passages recalling his first glimpses of wild Africa -- "what
Creation looked like." All of this, to complete the picture, in
the company of a tour guide named Francis.
An answer to the anti-colonial point is that, whatever else is
to be said of elephants and their claims of space, the very last
influence they should be associated with are the imperial
cultures of past times. Africa's people and elephants have
shared nothing if not common tormentors -- the gangs and
traffickers of today, the slave traders who once provided
most of the ivory in Europe and America, and so on just
about all the way back to the Roman era. A quarter-century
after the president's journey, moreover, their population
stands at a third or less of what it was then. It's a difference
of about a million dead elephants, and even the poorest
Africans seem to take a lenient view. As Julie Owona of
Cameroon writes at Al Jazeera: "with the disappearance of
elephants, the continent is losing a part of its soul."
What America can do to help is, in any event, for Barack
Obama to decide, and determined executive action would go
a long way here. A hundred outstanding issues between the
United States and China exist at any given moment, from
territorial disputes to currency problems to regional dangers.
Five or six issues, I suppose, are worked out by the principals
when they speak, as they will this week when President
Obama and China's new president, Xi Jinping, meet right
here in Southern California. Whether the African elephants
will survive, whether gangs and terrorists will rule the
savannah, belongs among those five or six central issues.
Exactly how such matters are handled at the commanding
heights, I could only guess. But it needs saying at such a
meeting, in so many words, that surely Yao Ming is the
future of China and not Zhao Bai; the prospering young man
who takes responsibility, and not the prideful old carver who
just doesn't give a damn. We in America know a little
something about vain luxuries and conspicuous
consumption ourselves, and don't present ourselves as
spotless. But the checkered history of Western nations, the
harm left behind by our own wretched excess, including the
very crimes that first drove the elephant into this nightmare
world, is no license for others to repeat them, least of all
when this crime can never be undone. For ages to come, one
way or the other, people will come to Africa to see the beauty
of its forests and plains. Without that sight like no other,
without the silhouette of the herds in the distance, it will
never be the same, it will feel empty and stilled by absence,
like the familiar places of a friend we have lost -- "Here is
where they used to be" -- and always visitors to Africa will
think: "China." This cannot be how a great people, living out
whatever destiny the Chinese see for themselves, wish to be
known by the rest of humanity.
The owner of a pricey ivory shop in Shanghai told the Times
that a gift of his wares "says this relationship is as precious as
ivory." An American president, in solidarity with African,
European Union, and G-8 nations, could say to his Chinese
counterpart, "This relationship is more precious than ivory,"
so let's deal with it quickly, accepting equal responsibility to
a continent where both our nations can do a lot of good
instead of a lot of harm. No nation, whatever its past
offenses, current troubles, or aspirations, will want the
vanishing of the elephant on its record. Here's a last chance,
for all of us, to set things right, without need of problems and
penalties that would cost far more than any country's stake
in ivory.
It would put some life into CITES, meanwhile, if our
delegation were instructed to initiate, right now, an honest,
"time-bound" debate about who's doing what to cause this
mayhem and what forceful penalties are in order. And those
penalties cannot issue from CITES alone. China some years
ago finally got serious about banning the domestic trade in
rhino horns -- a Chinese law enforced with quite severe
punishments -- for one simple reason: the United States
finally got serious about trade sanctions. A legal recourse
known as the Pelly Amendment authorizes presidential
action against nations that fail to comply with international
conservation regimes. Were the Obama administration to
invoke this authority in the case of ivory, instantly life would
become much harder for ivory dealers, and the prospects
much better for elephants.
Why not also a presidential speech about Africa's ordeal, on
the theme of an all-encompassing ban on ivory, a complete
ban on sales in America to set the standard, the destruction
of all stockpiles, the confident expectation of support among
friends in Asia, and material aid for on-the-ground
deterrence, with Yao Ming, leaders of the range states, and a
hundred African champions of the elephant to share the
stage? All those anti-poaching protests in Nairobi and
elsewhere are meant to get our attention and China's, too. A
White House event will gain them both in a hurry. For
Westerners, President Obama observed in his book, Africa
can be "an idea more than an actual place." So, live from the
East Room, let the world hear from people who know the
actual place and love it.
Across Asia, as these signals began to register, a wave of
interdictions, roundups, shutdowns, and newly inspired
reforms would soon be underway, exactly as Steve Itela,
director of Kenya's Youth for Conservation, envisions:
"China could end the killing by immediately closing its
domestic ivory markets and severely punishing citizens
engaged in illegal ivory trade. But it chooses ivory trinkets
for a luxury market over live elephants." A different set of
options, all around, will yield a different set of choices.
"White gold," the moment that fundamental political and
economic interests are felt even slightly on the other side of
the scale, will seem a lot less precious to all concerned.
***
Mrs. Clinton noted that "the United States is the secondlargest destination market for illegally trafficked wildlife in
the world. And that is something we are going to address."
We are also a prime destination for the "trophies" of
slaughtered elephants, and why not address that, too? With
so many of them dying as it is in Africa, do we really need
Bob Parsons, the Trump boys, and that whole crowd going
over there to kill even more?
The great flaw in the libertarian's
demand-must-prevail argument is that,
unlike illicit narcotics, ivory is finite in
supply and limited in location.
Authority for the 1989 presidential order banning ivory
imports derives from the African Elephant and Conservation
Act of the previous year. Imports from blood sport were
exempted at the behest of the big-game hunting industry, a
subculture of sadism that would appall the average citizen.
Amend that law and also the Endangered Species Act, to bar
any elephant product, and thousands of elephants will be
saved, just like that. The heart of America will be with
President Obama all the way. As for House and Senate
Republicans, eager to "rebrand" themselves, it doesn't get
much easier than a chance to show compassion for their own
party symbol.
The European Union likewise treats elephant trophies as
"personal effects" carted in from abroad, even as customs
authorities are suddenly finding smugglers sneaking the
other way, with tusks taken at zoos and, not long ago, hacked
off the skeleton of a beast from the menagerie of Louis XIV
in France's Museum of Natural History. You know you've got
an ivory crisis when you're catching poachers in the streets of
Paris, and the EU should act accordingly. All of our countries
would be doing rhinos, lions, polar bears, and many other
threatened or endangered animals a big favor with a ban on
every last "trophy" import, while also calling public attention
to the final martyrdom of the elephant.
Instead of sending more killers over there, let's send more
protectors. And let's direct aid to the scattered platoons of
rangers, militia, and private charities already giving their all.
They are people like Daphne Sheldrick, who was interviewed
at her shelter in Kenya not long ago by Chelsea Clinton for
NBC News. With her daughter Angela and a team of men,
Daphne is among those who rescue the calves who got away.
What a strange sight the cameras caught: a little herd of five
or six, led down a trail by an African man, all just baby
elephants. And the woman has been doing this for 50 years,
her only thanks the sight of severely traumatized fellow
creatures growing to maturity, living in peace, and learning
to trust. At first, she says, "they think we're the enemy." It
takes a little while, after that first impression that mankind
has made on them, but they figure it out. The orphans see all
of the other things that we can do, all of the other powers
that we have. Each time, it's just one baby elephant saved, a
little thing done with great love. But there is more beauty to
the picture than in all the carving factories of Asia. I hope
Chelsea shared some of this with her father. Maybe the
Clinton Global Initiative can get involved, so that all the
victims of poaching will have an advocate in the most
persuasive man in America.
Then there's an item out of Gabon, reported in the UK's
Daily Mail, that someone in Hollywood needs to take a look
at. It's about a fellow in that country, "a mild-mannered
British zoology professor" named Lee White, who left his
post at Stirling University in Manchester to save the
elephants and now leads an army of 250 rangers -- placed at
his disposal by President Ali Bongo -- to secure the nation's
13 parks. The military has offered an additional force of
3,000 soldiers, and one day every herd in the rainforests of
Gabon can relax at least a little under the protection of the
legion of Professor White. "I know I am in a strange
position," he told the paper. "But this is no longer a
biological issue -- it is a security issue. Either people like me
can keep studying these animals until they disappear or we
have to join the fight to protect them." Jungles, ruthless
gangs, brave African fighters, this gallant man -- get it all in
the script, and find the next Peter O'Toole to play the part.
It can be as hard to track the protectors, engaged in on-theground operations, as it is to get a fix on the enemy. At this
very moment, plans are in motion to get the fiends from
Sudan who butchered the 89 elephants in Chad. Ministers
from eight central nations met in Cameroon after the
massacre and declared that they would gather a thousandman expeditionary force and send it east. The mission is part
of a new Extreme Emergency Anti-Poaching Plan,
PEXULAB, which sounds promising -- more "air support,
field vehicles, satellite phones, the establishment of a joint
military command" -- until you see the funds available for
the effort, all of $2.5 million to cover Central Africa. From
the Central African Republic, meanwhile, an America
academic named Louisa Lombard noted some gunfire there
in a Times op-ed: "In remote parklands, far from public
scrutiny, park rangers and militias led by foreign
mercenaries, safari guides and French soldiers on a
cooperation mission for the government have been fighting a
dirty war on behalf of the elephants." We can only hope
that's going well, and it's not hard to guess one of their
objectives. Somewhere in the same vicinity is the Lord's
Resistance Army of Joseph Kony, who, as of April, carries a
bounty of up to $5 million under America's War Crimes
Rewards Program. Which suggests a general approach for
the arrest of all poachers: Put a price on their heads and see
how they like it.
Some places, however, remain almost entirely undefended,
such as the vast Niassa reserve where northern Mozambique
meets Tanzania at the Rovuma River. There, reports the
Voice of America, "all the poachers have to do is cross over in
canoes to get to the elephants, which they attack with high-
caliber weapons." Mozambique has enlisted help from the
Wildlife Conservation Society, but poachers still kill four or
five elephants a day, with special attention lately to the
matriarchs so that the others are left leaderless. "Rangers try
to stop the poachers, though it is a lopsided battle. There are
only 40 rangers to patrol the park ... and the rangers are
armed with rifles that date back to World War II." Some are
caught, but even then, explains VOA, the fines are light and
to this day "Mozambique's penal code dates back to
Portuguese colonial times, and does not recognize poaching
as a crime."
The whole effort across the continent, as you try piece it
together, can seem a blur of rag-tag ranger patrols,
improvised fighting units, multinational efforts, NGO
initiatives, and UN appendages. And however admirable
each might be, one has the feeling that even in combination
they look more formidable on paper than they do on the
ground. Somewhere in the effort too is our own U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, which manages a fund set aside for
elephants that, in 2011, was given $1.7 million to spread
around for law-enforcement and aerial surveillance efforts. It
feels awkward to call any federal program "underfunded,"
with a national debt in excess of $16 trillion, but that would
be a candidate. And the extra $100,000 pledged last year by
the state department, for "a global system of regional wildlife
enforcement networks," doesn't have the ring of a gamechanger either.
Spend nothing at all or spend all that is needed, drawing on
guidance from our U.S. Africa Command to equip national
and local anti-poaching forces and turn events toward
victory. So many of the military and intelligence capabilities
our country has developed or refined in recent years to deal
with terrorists are the same that would track and stop
poachers, who in trans-Saharan Africa are terrorists,
bringing misery and death to people as well as to wildlife.
American forces have the technological architecture and
operational knowledge to put these killers to rout. Sharing
that technology and manpower, within a coordinated
strategy that only America can lead, would give African
states a decisive upper hand.
Second only to presidential action, and any military
assistance that the United States can offer, if anything can
help here it is fast action by American philanthropies,
providing the means of protection while keeping bureaucracy
at a minimum. An example is the Google Foundation, which
last year awarded $5 million to the World Wildlife Fund for
drones to track both the herds and the killers. An
outstanding idea: And if that or some other foundation will
donate more, drones -- and with them the capacity to pass
information rapidly to law enforcement on the ground -could in short order cover the most vulnerable regions.
Conservative foundations, too, instead of just keeping
"fellows" flush at CATO and elsewhere, could get outside
their think-tank comfort zone to accomplish something real,
enduring, and altruistic in Africa. As Jonah Goldberg put it
last January, "the poachers need to be crushed." Though he
is "not sure it makes a lot of sense for the U.S. government to
get officially involved militarily, I would love to see some
foundation hire some ex-special forces to lend a hand." Why
not? A voluntary effort, perhaps in concert with well-targeted
U.S. military support, to show that here, too, the good can be
more resourceful than the wicked.
"Policy to Come," as speech drafts put it when enthusiasm
runs ahead of practical details. Enough to point out that the
details and obstacles here, whatever they are, haven't
prevented foreign mercenaries from getting involved already,
apparently, along with French soldiers and our own special
forces assigned to get terrorists poaching in Central Africa.
And somehow a British zoology professor is leading soldiers
of the Gabonese Republic up and down the Ogooué River in
defense of the elephants. How might a unified effort by
highly trained American ex-servicemen and women, along
with British and European counterparts, affect the security
environment? The mere presence, in proximity to every
herd, of expert warfighters with equipment and technology
equal to the task, would have an enormous deterrent effect.
If the aim is a sudden and sober recalculation of risk by ivory
poachers, then let word get around the range states that
reinforcements have arrived, and from now on it's not just a
few valiant men with old rifles that they'll have to contend
with.
Of all people, it was a Chinese delegate to CITES who, on the
way out the door in Bangkok, advised that everyone "focus
less on the demand side of the equation and instead consider
the anti-poaching capacity of countries which were losing
their elephants." He had a point, at least for the short term,
in a year when another thirty or forty thousand elephants
will die for their ivory. The great flaw in the libertarian's
demand-must-prevail argument is that, unlike illicit
narcotics, ivory is finite in supply and limited in location.
And if those ranges, broad and scattered as they are, can be
forcefully defended, then demand will be killed off instead of
the elephants. Demand for ivory might be a craze but it is not
an implacable addiction. And commerce in the material
depends on unique skills that pass away with the carvers, so
that even a decade of earnest protection buys vital time. In
that crucial period, for a fairly small price, private
foundations, and all the more those with an environmental
agenda, could accomplish more than CITES has in its four
decades, saving people and elephants alike from a threat that
brings ruin to all.
The non-military aid could go to WildAid, Humane Society
International, and other such advocacy groups, or straight to
those like Save the Elephant, a faithful and long-suffering
organization that posts on its website such humble but
essential objectives as: "Goal 1. Get a supercub aircraft in the
air over Tsavo National Park in Kenya, scene of a recent
poaching surge, to assist the Kenya Wildlife Service in
protecting the areas. ... The aircraft and pilot are ready to go.
We need to build them a hangar and put fuel in the aircraft
to keep it airborne every day this year."
Someone get these people the hangar and fuel. Get the antipoaching forces all of the equipment, weapons, aircraft, and
communications and surveillance capacity they need, in
every place they need them. Provide chief ranger Joseph
Okouyi in Gabon and his men the planes and boats and
camps that they need, and Professor White whatever he asks,
and the Sheldricks and others like them funds to nourish the
orphans and keep them safe. And in every way, on every
front, let them know that the United States of America is on
their side.
We should give to these kindhearted people all that we can,
and our prayers, too, because this forlorn, sentimental cause
of theirs is the cause of humanity, in the story of life that is
bigger than humanity, and right now the fight is not going
our way. This is ground we cannot afford to surrender, the
final refuge of animals who mourn their own, and deserve
more than to be let go and mourned by us. We would miss
the elephants, forever, with only regrets and recollections to
fill the space, these grand, peaceable fellow creatures whose
final, bloody departure from the earth would warrant a
rebuke of Old Testament proportions: "What is this that
thou hast done?"
Let the spirit of it all be Francis -- the pope and, better still,
the saint, who "walked the earth like the pardon of God." But
let tactics, strategy, and diplomacy, across Asia and Africa,
be inspired by men a little more familiar with what it takes
sometimes to protect the beauty of the created world.
Poachers, explained chief ranger Paul Onyango to Jeffrey
Gettleman, as they surveyed the bodies of twenty slain
elephants at a park in Congo, should not expect negotiations,
or warnings, or even much in the way of due process: "Out
here, it's not michezo." As the Times translates, it's a Swahili
way of conveying to enemies that this is serious and we don't
play games.