Teenage Youth: Elephant and Human Parallels

Teenagers rebel against parental controls, right?

Well, most in human societies they do, to some extent at least. It is all a matter of degree.  At the mildest end of the scale they may stay out a tad later than an imposed curfew time or chitchat, text or tweet about parents.  I grew a beard. It did not last long because it was truly an eyesore, tricoloured (red, white and brown) and straggly.

At the other end of the scale things can get pretty ugly. Gang warfare, extreme violence, even murder.

A report in the Los Angeles Times of Dec 16 last year, passed on to me by my daughter, who has a teenager of her own, made me dive into my memory banks as she reminded me of its parallel to things I had witnessed in elephant society.

It was titled Michigan study: Fewer men around? Expect more youth violence. Of course I had a look at the links and was struck by the fact that the author’s name was Daniel Kruger. He was quoted by the Times as follows:

A new study that zeroed in on a single city in Michigan found that where men are scarce, youth were more likely to commit assaults.

“Male scarcity is actually a driver of conditions,"... "It’s the most powerful predictor.”

Dr. Kruger is a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of the study, originally published in the Journal of Community Psychology. Other media outlets picked up the story and there are similar studies reported elsewhere.

None of these studies picked up on the great similarity they have to events in elephant society that I first learned about in South Africa in 1997. I was with my wife on a study leave from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine  and by sheer chance, or maybe an alignment of the planets we were visiting a former student and friend, Bob Keffen. Bob had been determined to work as a wildlife vet in Africa even before he graduated. He had had to settle for a job as a park ranger and was employed in Pilansberg NP. He managed to wangle an invitation for me to sit in on a meeting about a major elephant problem.

The problem was all to do with teenage elephants and the lack of big bulls in the population (sounds like Dr. Kruger's study in Michigan).

In the 1970s and 80s elephant numbers had grown out of proportion to the capacity of the Kruger NP, South Africa’s largest, to feed them and the park’s vegetation was taking a hammering. 

A cull, this one in Rwanda in 1975. The young went to the Akagera NP

It was thought that a humane way of dealing with problem in park was to cull adults, capture juveniles and transfer them to other locations. 

 Pilansberg had been one such destination and several young elephants, all under the age of ten, had been shipped there. At first all seemed well and of course the new animals drew plenty of tourists. It was not only the elephants that were new. Plenty of rhino, mostly white rhino, had been taken there as well.

The elephants grew up, but of course had no parental guidance and a complete loss of social and family history.

Such history is vital to elephant society and it comes as no surprise, after the work of Joyce Poole and others like Cynthia Moss, that events in Pilansberg did not follow the normal path.

Male elephants reach sexual maturity at about age 17 but get little chance to breed until they are much older. Their most aggressive activities take place during musth, when testosterone levels go sky high and various externally visible changes rake place. Secretions from the pre-orbital gland drip down the side of their faces and a green secretion drips from the penile sheath. Before she had worked out what was happening Dr. Poole had even called it “Green Penis Syndrome.”  

In a moving speech at the 22^nd AnnualElephant Managers Workshop Dr. Poole said Young males coming into musth for the first time… are unsure of their new selves, apparent slaves to their raging hormones.

In “normal” elephant society mature bulls, that can detect the smell of a female in heat from up to 10 km away, will quickly suppress any musth tendencies in these teenagers. Dr. Poole saw this happen as quickly as twenty minutes after an encounter.  

In Pilansberg there were no big bulls to control the youngsters, and the females had no chance of doing so, not even if they formed coalition groups and talked to one another in their subsonic language.  By their late teens the bulls were larger and heavier than any female, even the few rescued from circuses that had arrived as adults.

In the early 90s some strange things began to happen. White rhinos were found dead, and without doubt elephants had attacked many of them.   

A rhino that survived attack, but has a serious hole in his shoulder

Trampling around the kill site, footprints and most compelling of all, large holes in the sides of the rhinos that can only have been created by tusks.

Then the evidence chain became absolutely certain when rangers in helicopters saw single male elephants chasing rhinos. There is even photographic evidence of one such encounter. An unnamed tour bus operator watched as an elephant encountered a rhino and attacked it. 

Into the river

First encounter

In this series of photos to you can see the attack and its outcome, which had a happier ending than many as the rhino escaped. 

 

Unwilling partner. Escape maybe?

Made it! Not all were so lucky

The photos were shared with me by one of Bob Keffen’s ranger colleagues, Gus Van Dyk. The quality is not great, but they were taken with a small camera and then I got copies of what were probably already copies.

In all, during the period 1992-96 some 49 rhino deaths could be attributed to elephant aggression. When known culprits were identified they were shot, and periods of lull in rhino deaths followed.

Of course this does not answer the question of why? Why rhinos? One can only speculate, but one possible explanation is that the young males, like young males of many species, were going through puberty, or had just gone through it, and were looking for some sex. The only thing they recognized as being about the right size and that were standing around were the rhino. On top of that the Joyce Poole phrase about them being apparent slaves to their raging hormones during musth may have played a role.

In human terms there was one terrible ending when a musth elephant attacked a parked vehicle and the family’s father was killed. Two male elephants were culled after that incident. You can read many more details here in an article published in 2001 in the South African wildlife journal Koedoe.

My participation in the meeting with Dr. Poole, Bob and other park staff was minimal, although one ranger did ask about the possibility of elephant castration. On this subject I was able to tell them that the process took a long time and was quite complicated because an elephant’s testes lie inside the abdomen, close to the kidneys and are difficult to reach because of the animal’s sheer size. As far as I know the first such surgery was performed by my friend and colleague Dr. Murray Fowler  and took about three hours. Everyone at the table realized at once that this was not an option in Pilansberg.

It was very soon obvious that Joyce Poole had the solution. She urged the park authorities to bring in a few mature bulls, that she called “super bulls” to suppress the juveniles quickly and create a more normal breeding environment for the entire elephant and rhino societies. The obvious place to source them was the Kruger NP.

Elephant boma with lots of power

It was also obvious that she had made this suggestion quite some time ahead of the meeting because after lunch we were taken out to see the newly built pen into which these super bulls would be placed. It was tiny, perhaps only 40 metres on a side, but fully rigged with several high voltage lines, each on a different circuit. As Gus explained, “we have to teach them to respect fences, which they have never had to do in the Kruger.”

"Super bulls" solved the problem, but created some new ones.

Bob later told me that the results were a resounding success, with one interesting wrinkle. The big bulls soon changed the vegetation in the park as they knocked down and ripped up trees.

I wonder how many readers of this post have spotted the odd coincidence of the name of the park in Africa where the elephants were sourced and the name of the lead author of the report about the human youth problems in Michigan. Both are Kruger.

Elephant and rhino poaching update

If the reports are accurate hundreds or rhino and thousands of elephants have been poached this year, never mind the numbers from previous years. It has become difficult to keep up with the amount of traffic about rhino and elephant poaching on various social media sites and in on-line newspapers. On the one hand there are the announcements about famous people who have come out in support of anti-poaching efforts.

They include a United Nations story that China’s top film star, Li Bingbing has stepped up in support of her countryman Yao Ming. To assist in these efforts the Chinese media have been asked to back the war on poaching  Of course these two are trying to influence things that take place in the world’s major consuming country, where stunningly beautiful ivory carvings have been created for centuries and where an increasingly affluent and growing middle class can afford to make expensive purchases.

A YouTube video featuring Vietnamese singer My Linh is an attempt to raise awareness of the ‘Say NO to rhino horn” in her country.

The Secretary General of the United Nations has come out with a strongly worded statement calling poaching a “grave menace.” 

A MailOnline article about Prince Charles and Prince William has a strong personal link for me.

Most folks are aware that William proposed to his wife Katherine in Kenya. Many know that the actual words were spoken high on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya under the shadow of a flat-topped minor peak named Rutundu at an altitude of 3311 metres (about 10,200 feet). We used to be able to see Rutundu from our living room window and I once walked up to the table lands on the shoulders of the mountain to the nearby at Lake Alice at the foot of a sister flat peak called Ithanguni.

image from

 bks.beyondkenyasafaris.com

But this was before the days when the lakes were stocked with trout by a wealthy Scadinavian who flew them in by helicopter. Nowadays the site has become an upmarket tourist destination and has rustic log cabins for guests.

Bald and one tooth missing at right. Rugby days with Mt. Kenya!

I have an even stronger link to this story as the Royal couple had been staying with a mutual friend Ian Craig at his home on Lewa Downs, which was one of my client cattle ranches for the best part of ten years. In those days Ian’s parents David and Delia ran the ranch and Ian played alongside me in pale blue strip of the Mt. Kenya rugby club as a hard-hitting open side wing forward.

Since then the ranch has become a major wildlife conservancy and is home to many rhino as well as other species, including the Grevy's zebra, which is another endagnered species.

 

Grevy's (at right) and Burchell's zebra near Lewa. Photo by Dick Neal.

Sadly the rhino there are being targeted and a recent report told of the coordinated killing of four animals on a full moon night at Lewa and three other well-known parks. 

Although these famous folk, like many of us around the world are horrified by the destruction of these iconic creatures I do wonder if the high profile and greatly increased attention is not driving the other side of the equation. If anti-poaching efforts are gaining momentum, are the bad guys grabbing what they can before the effort becomes too risky? There has been a continued increase in the rate of rhino poaching. The latest figures state that 381 have been taken in 154 days. On that trajectory the numbers for 2013 will exceed the 688 of 2012.

Two US businessmen (Vinh Chung “Jimmy” Kha and Felix Kha) were recently jailed and fined for trafficking in rhino horn.     

Of course, as I have suggested before, the poaching for a commodity (I choose the word deliberately as that is what some see it as) is not a one-sided story. A recent FB post suggests that trading in LEGAL horn derived from one of the many South African game ranches should be allowed. Johan Kurver has argued that the cost of preventing and policing poaching makes no sense when ranched rhino could provide a good income and tax base. You can follow the rhino conversation on Facebook.

Two more stories (among many) about the twin threats. The Kenya parliament has just passed an emergency bill upping the punishment for wildlife trafficking by a huge amount. Previous fines might have been as much as USD 480, a tiny proportion of the value of a single rhino horn and no sort of deterrent. Now fines may be as much as $120,000 with a 15-year jail term as well. The most striking thing about this amendment is that the vote was not unanimous. There was one quiet “nay” but nobody seems to have reported who made that call. Was that parliamentarian somehow involved in the illegal trade?

The Kenya cabinet were reacting to a country-wide upsurge in publicity that included protest marches and a well managed campaign led by people like Paula Kahumbu, who has been very active in blogs, on Facebook and Twitter on this issue.

Even a very young elephant has some ivory

On the other side it would seem that in Tanzania some thing different and ugly is taking place. Some reports claim that about 10,000 elephants a year are being poached (yes, ten thousand). Of course this form or poaching is indiscriminate. Entire families are being taken out, adults, infants and everything in between. It seems that high-placed officials and even the military are implicated. David Smith, writing on the economicsof the wildlife trade states that “More than a third of all elephant tusks seized by law enforcement last year came from Tanzania, with neighbouring Kenya a close second.” This is particularly striking in light of the interview with a senior Tanzanian minister carried out by Aidan Hartley  The minister claimed no knowledge of the problem. There can only be one of two explanations for his words, neither of them pretty. Incompetence or Collusion.

Dinosaur and elephant cooling

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I am a dedicated listener to the Saturday noon-hour radio show Quirks and Quarks. When I first got addicted Jay Ingram, who leads the Banff Science Communications program each year was the show’s host. For many years now Bob MacDonald has been the man.

Today’s show had story about dinosaurs and the question of how they might handle heat. You can listen to the entire interview (for the next 6 weeks) on the CBC podcast here

As soon as the show was over I sent this letter (slightly edited) to the CBC Q&Q contacts page. I’ll let you know if I get a response.

Your story with the dinosaur researcher Mike Rowe reminded me of two things. One was the light-hearted article in the Journal Of Irreproducible Results in which the authors debated whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded. As I recall they concluded that the beasts must have been cold-blooded because the entire surface of the earth would have been covered in many metres of dino-dung if they were warm-blooded! I tried to find the article on Google, but had no luck. If any reader can find it please send it to me and of course post it on the replies page of this blog.

On a more serious note, Rowe did not once mention the ear-flapping behaviour of elephants and I have no idea what the ears of his Edmontosaurus dinosaur would have looked like. Ear flapping is a vital part of the cooling strategy of today’s elephants. About 30 years ago the pioneering wildlife veterinarian Dr. ToniHarthoorn whom I worked with in my Kenya days told me of an experiment he did that shows an interesting component of that behaviour. He implanted thermistors in the artery and vein at the ear base and compared the temperatures of the blood in both vessels when the ears were still or waving. There was almost no difference between them until the waving began. When they moved there was a marked drop in the venous temperature as the blood returned to the body. Sadly time has eroded the actual figure from my now 71-year old brain, but a figure of 10 degree C keeps trying to assert itself.

Certainly, when I worked on elephants in Kenya and Rwanda we routinely poured water over the ears and flapped them while the animals were immobilized. You can even see evidence of this on my website under >photography>elephant, rhino, hippo (picture 25 of 30). Here is that photo, to save you chasing it down.

Did the ingenious masks that Mike Rowe designed to measure metabolic activity allow the ears to move? Without this component of the research I have to wonder if it is valid.

Sincerely,

Jerry Haigh

Wildlife veterinarian, Author, Storyteller.

Elephants and CITES, stumble or small step?

ISBN 1-904440-38-X

In his 2004 book What I Tell You Three Times is True Ian Parker had a whole chapter titled CITES – THE UNWORKABLE TREATY. The acronym CITES stands for The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora. It was first signed in 1973 by representatives of 51 nations and by 1979 there were 527 listed species. In 2004 Ian wrote “Now, after an orgy of silliness, over 50,000 plant and animal species are on CITES lists, each having to be recognized by its scientific name...” By 2013 178 nations had signed on. The is one problem, as Ian wrote. Nobody seems to have calculated the financial cost of this unwieldy bureaucracy. 

Ian had been a game warden in the very early days of the Kenya Game Department and wrote several books about the country’s wildlife. He was particularly knowledgeable about elephants and wrote two books about them and their tusks, so coveted by humans through the ages. The first, in 1983, was Ivory Crisis, co-authored with the wonderful photographer Mohamed Amin. Twenty-one years later came “Three Times”, with its subtitle Conservation, Ivory, History and Politics. That just about covers anything one can think of to do with Ivory.

It is not as if Ian was an outside observer of CITES. He was commissioned to study the ivory trade in 1979 and wrote a detailed report about his findings. He had attended CITES meetings in 1981 and 1983 as a representative of legitimate ivory traders. He came away from those meetings gravely disillusioned and wrote of the 1983 gathering that “the only thing of use to come out of the conference was the green plastic briefcase with the CITES logo (the copyright for which was paid for by the ivory traders).”

There is a newish wrinkle to the elephant story. The trading of ivory has become big business. If the many recent posts on the subject are right ivory (along with a wide range of other wildlife products) has joined the ranks of drugs, weapons, and human trafficking as a “matter of interest” to organized crime.

As any who follow the elephant and ivory story are well aware the recent CITES meeting in Bangkok produced a less than firm result on the ivory trade and matters concerning elephant conservation. If there we any positives they were about the testing of ivory for DNA, which can give an accurate picture of its source.

There are several articles and blogs in major outlets such as Nature, The Scientific American, The online Guardian, The New York Times and social media sites such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

  

This one, from a TV station out of New York called New Tang Dynasty (NTD) headlined China’s Demand for Ivory Fueling Elephant Poaching was particularly interesting because it claims many Chinese people believe that ivory falls out and can be collected, a bit like deer antler.  NTD with correspondents in over 70 cities world-wide has a mission “to bring truthful and uncensored information into and out of China; to restore and promote traditional Chinese culture; and to facilitate mutual understanding between the East and West.” 

Reporter, film maker and activist Bryan Christy posted a remarkable letter, dated March 7^th 2013 and signed by Robert Hepworth, the former chair of the CITES standing committee on elephants and ivory trade. It was sent to every delegate at the Bangkok meeting and opened with “I write to you to express my deep concern about the crisis facing elephants and the discussions and negotiations in Bangkok.” He goes on to urge them to “implement an urgent, indefinite and comprehensive ban on ivory trade including domestic markets.”

So, was a ban forthcoming? The simple answer is No. As one on-line forum  put it in an article titled CITES: Rhetoric and tiptoeing around elephant poaching. “The actual outcome was far short of what was expected and, indeed, what was needed to secure the fate of elephants.”

In what was clearly a cop-out, or some sort of milk-sop compromise the delegates warned eight countries to watch their step. Damian Carrington of the Guardian wrote “Stop Ivory Poaching or Face Sanctions, nations warned at CITES.” These are countries where ivory grows: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda; countries through which ivory is smuggled: Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines; and destination countries: Thailand and China. The threat of sanctions are more or less a political “stand in the corner you naughty child” response from the bad old days of primary school.

With its huge carving industry, including government-sponsored factories, China is not like to do more than pay lip service to any such “warning.” As they flex their mighty economic muscles in so many fields I cannot see them taking any meaningful notice of the CITES position. Thailand’s Prime Minister made a statement that at first appeared to support the ban, but Bryan Christy tweeted the following that tells a different story: Thai PM did NOT commit to end ALL ivory trade according to this #cites doc. Only ILLEGAL trade pic.twitter.com/fONfeNvTNg

It may be that the CITES members were scared off by terrifyingly powerful crime syndicates, cow-towing to the might of the Chinese or perhaps they were simply re-enforcing Parker’s assertion about an unworkable treaty.

There are some bright spots in this sorry tale, but they have not yet become incandescent. People in Kenya have begun to realize that without elephants their tourist industry will take a hammering. There have been street rallies in Nairobi and at least one member of the public has garnered news headlines with his long walks.

Perhaps the brightest of all appears in a brief but inspiring segment of the National Geographic film Battle for the Elephants. Richard Bonham, who owns a safari lodge in the Chyulu hills, right next to Amboseli National Park founded the Big LifeFoundation. It was not Bonham’s first venture into conservation. He has been closely involved with lion conservation for some years. From all appearances he used the successful model of employing local Masai people to protect the lions into a similar program for elephants. In the movie he describes how 280 rangers are employed and gives statistics on the carnage, comparing the loss of 16 elephants in 18 months under his scheme with the 30 per day in Tanzania.

On the other hand a smooth and urbane minister in the Tanzanian government denied any knowledge of illegal ivory sales and stated it would be “impossible.” He was being interviewed by Aidan Hartley for that same National Geographic film. He expressed shock and was “really surprised” when Hartley came back and showed him how easy it had been to find illegal vendors and set up a purchase.  

It will take street activists, like those walkers in Nairobi, to get action at the supply end. At the consumer end one can only hope that stars like Yao Ming and young people like CeliaHo, about whom I have written before, will be heard.  Celia has to juggle school studies (she is 14) but is active on Facebook. I have other ivory-related blogs as well. 

Both Aidan Hartley and Bryan Christy tried to give a positive spin on their grim story and Hartley ended with this statement.

“We shouldn’t give up hope, but it is a race against time. Because at the moment we’re losing elephant populations at such a fast rate that by the time the Chinese middle classes wake up, by the time that they’ve stopped buying all this stuff, it’ll be too late.

Christy hopes to return to China in twenty years and shake hands with the people he met during his undercover assignment.

With organized crime in the game I am not optimistic.

Celia Ho's reply on ivory in China

Here is Celia Ho's quick reply to my email and blog post. She wasted no time and we need to encourage her. If you have contacts in schools and so on, please ask them, especially the children, to write to Celia.

To get a better idea of what she is trying to do first of all visit her website here.

Date: 10 February, 2013 8:37:22 PM CST

To: Jerry Haigh

Reply-To: Celia Ho

Dear Jerry,

Many thanks for your encouraging words! Of course you are influential as there are many Chinese people in Canada and your efforts to relay the information could be very important.

Thank you very much for spreading the idea of ivory ban to the next generation who controls the fate of our earth. Would you please tell me the name of the schools you talked to with the number of students so that I can add them to the ‘students supporting ivory ban’ part in my website?

I've visited your website and was very interested in the ‘Rhino Capture’ part in your book 'The Trouble with Lions’, which I would like to purchase after reading Jane’s foreword. Could you please give me a price? I am from Hong Kong.

Wish you all the best in your meaningful work and I would like to tell you that you are living a life which I have been longing for:)

Warmest regards,

Celia

This was my reply

How nice to hear from you Celia,
I hope that you are not being flooded with emails, as you must surely have other school work to do. Or perhaps you have understanding teachers?
If you check out my website pictures you may use any of the elephant photos that you like for your own collection. This may be my favourite one. As you have a yahoo address I am sending it in low resolution only because in my experience that server cannot deal with large files. If you would like it larger please let me know.
I will send you the schools and classes as I speak to them. I do not have any storytelling engagements right now, but next month I am expecting one or two. I have tried to spread the word of your activity as far as I can. Let's hope some action takes place.
Best wishes.
Jerry 
A relieving scratch in Murchison Falls NP, Uganda

The Chinese Ivory Industry

Reporter Bryan Christy recently attended a meeting convened by US  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The subject was the illegal wildlife trade entitled Wildlife Trafficking and Conservation: A Call to Action.

Here are some of the statements that Christy made in his blog about that meeting. You can see the rest of this material and links to other reports he has made by dipping into the site.

The Chinese government, through its company China National Arts and Crafts Group Corporation (CNACG), aka Goalmark, is the world’s largest ivory purchaser, carver, and retailer. It purchased two-thirds (40 tonnes) of the roughly 62 tonnes of ivory sold at auction to China in 2008, and it controlled the import price on the remaining 20 tonnes sold to the three other Chinese bidders.

The Chinese government is expanding its ivory consuming capacity. In 2009, it built China’s largest ivory carving factory.

Chinese ivory carving is big business involving a small number of individuals—perhaps a few hundred, based on my observations—only about a dozen of whom are recognized national master carvers.

As long as the Chinese government is in the business of expanding the ivory trade, ivory-related crime will flourish.

On the other side of the story, Chinese basketball star Yao Ming has recently been trying to raise the profile of this issue. A couple of UK newspapers, the Guardian and the Times ran stories about his visit to Kenya. He is reputed to be much loved and respected in his home country. Will his efforts make any difference? I do hope so, but I’m not overly optimistic. He is fighting a “City Hall” but one with serious muscle.

Ivory As Art and Icon Through the Ages

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When I wrote about elephant poaching in my blog of Oct 2nd my timing was either terrible or fantastic. Less than two weeks later our copy of the iconic National Geographic Magazine arrived and there, splashed across the front cover is the headline Blood Ivory: 25,000 ELEPHANTS WERE KILLED LAST YEAR. I cannot show the cover, but I did find a version of it on line. 

The article, by Bryan Christy, with photos by Brent Stirton, takes a really up-to-date and deeply probing look at the end users, with lots of information that was new to me. Christy’s account is of events in recent times, but the back history is just as fascinating and it is this side of the story that I am trying to highlight here. I’ll also offer a brief précis of the National Geographic piece, for those who have not seen it, but the story runs to 30 pages and I will not even try in 30 paragraphs. There are several new URL pages about this story, which has garnered quite a lot of reaction. You can find somne of that at Christy's blog.

            It would be naïve to suggest that the human desire to acquire beautiful things is something new, or that it never took place on a large scale. Witness the recent discovery of ancient trading records from the Egyptian city of Alexandria. One ship alone in the Third Century BC carried 100 tonnes of elephant tusks in a single voyage. Acquiring so much stuff must have been a massive undertaking. We will never know how much of the ivory was “found” from carcasses. In this context found carcasses are those of animals that have died a “natural” death.

The first text I read that really looked at this part of the trade was Ian Parker’s and Mohamed Amin’s Ivory Crisis (Chatto and Windus 1983).

In terms of the consumption end of the equation, Parker suggested that a reverence for ivory crosses all human cultures and times. In his chapter titled A Long White Trail he quoted from a wide variety of sources from many corners of the world. The oldest record that Parker found was the use of small figurines, possibly fertility goddesses, that date back about 40,000 years.

There are several references to the erotic nature of ivory in the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon For instance: 

"Your neck is as beautiful as an ivory tower."

Throughout time several thrones (including Solomon’s) have been made of ivory, or ivory and gold inlay. 

Author and ivory trader Ernst More wrote Ivory: Scourge of Africa in 1931. In a lengthy piece about thrones he wrote: …"we should include the ivory chair, inlaid with gold, or Suleiman the Magnificent, in which he sat while, on the feast of Bairam, all the harem women came to kiss the unspeakable Turkish foot."

John Petherick, the 19^th century explorer who preceded Burton and Speke in the Sudan and on the Nile met tribesmen who used who used ivory bracelets and necklaces and many other African tribes enjoyed its special lustre in similar ways. The Baganda, in what is now Uganda, even used small ivory disks as currency.

The apogee of all this consumption, at least until modern times of which Brian Christy reports, must surely be during Roman times. The seats in the senate were made of ivory, and if that was not enough Emperor Caligula built a whole stable from the stuff for his horse. Another account has it that the stable was made of marble, but had an ivory manger. I wonder if this was Caligula’s favourite, named Incitatus, which, according to some historians, was attended by servants and fed oats mixed with gold flake. It seems quite possible as he was emperor for only four years before being assassinated.

It does seem that the massive killing of the elephants of North Africa, the kind that Hannibal took across the Alps, may have been the principal cause of their extermination.

There are many other examples that Parker gave, but these give a taste.

By the early 20^th century extra sets of uses had appeared in Western culture. Billiard balls and piano keys were made of ivory. Not any more, but you can find websites that advertise antique billiard balls. Caveat emptor, plastic can be made to look very like the real thing.   

Much ivory is worked into exquisite pieces of unimaginable complexity. One that has intrigued me is the ivory ball shown here. In the top segment there are twelve balls carved inside one another. There are no splits of creases in the work. Each ball is carved in turn, from the outside, and each one rotates independently. If the outer one that one can clearly see is delicate and amazing, having taken hours, probably days, to carve, how difficult was it for the incredibly skilled craftsman to work the innermost, and what sort of highly specialized instrument was used? The bottom ball had only six layers.

I found this image from the National Museum of Taiwan. The close-up of the ball shows some of the 21 layers that a real artisan had created.

Carver at work. Douala, 1997

When I did some volunteer work for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Cameroon in the 1990s I visited the ivory trading centre in Doula, the commercial capital of the country. There were several carvers toiling way, but the standard of workmanship did not even approach those balls on their tower.

Ivory pieces and wood carvings in the Douala market

 The biggest surprise, for me, is the widespread used of and reverence for ivory among Roman Catholics in the Philippines. Christy quotes one collector who stated that “I don’t see the elephant, I see the Lord.” One of Stirton’s photos shows a man sitting among an extraordinary collection of ivory statues and elaborate carvings that must be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.   

One of the most amazing pieces is a carving of Christ on the cross, which hangs in a museum in Manila. His body, carved from a single tusk, is 30 inches long. You can see a small reproduction of this photo in this article.

Some of the vigorous reactions to this story appear here in Church reaction to art or in "Philippines officials react & may go after“blood ivory” holders." 

Another of Stirton’s photos shows a worker in China’s largest ivory-carving factory working on single tusk that has been turned into a cornucopia of leaves, berries and goodness knows what else. How long it took to create is impossible for me to even guess, but there is not doubt that the craftsmanship is extraordinary. It is a pity that I cannot show it here, but maybe you will have to find the story somewhere.

During his two year investigation Christy met a wealthy 42-year-old man named Gary Zeng in China. When the author asked why young entrepreneurs like him are buying ivory the conservation went:

“Value,” he replies. “And art.”

‘Do you think about the elephant?” I ask.

“Not at all,” he says.

I could go on, but I hope that this is enough to give you a small taste of the situation. If the Roman greed for ivory really did lead to the disappearance of elephants from North Africa, are we heading to a wider extirpation driven by Chinese, Philippine and other consumers who know the beauty of ivory but would rather see it in a statue than growing on the original owner?

Elephant Poaching in Africa

Two nasty stories about the current wave of elephant slaughter in Africa. They came a day apart and I’ll take them in chronological order. The first was a report in the Wildlife News blog by Kevin Heath of Sept 27 2012. He wrote about a new and horrifying technique in Mozambique where poachers were caught using anti-tank mines.


Heath also wrote "In June a gang of poachers including Zimbabweans had been caught using poison pills to kill the regions elephants for the ivory."

I have seen the results of land mine use on elephants in Sri Lanka. These injuries were almost certainly the result of accidental triggering of the huge number of munitions used in the long-running battle between the Tamil Tigers and the government.

On our trip to Sri Lanka two years we visited the Pinnawala elephant sanctuary. We watched a group of elephants cross the highway to bathe. 

If you look carefully you can see that the very last one in the line has a severely humped back. 

This picture, grabbed on line, is of that same animal as she struggles to get to the water. You can see why her back is so humped—she has had to transfer much of her weight to the rear in order to be able to stand. She is one of dozens of land mine elephant victims in the country.

If that can happen with a land mine, how much worse would an anti-tank mine be?

On a prettier and more cheerful note you you can see a large group of Indian elephants bathing in the river. The single cow joined them and appeared to be having a good time. Her mahouts were particualty loving and caring.

Next day, Sept 28, came a report from J. Michael Fay in the National Geographic news watch page titled (Elephant Guards Murdered in Chad)

I’ll quote direct from his post, as it is both chilling and self-explanatory.

“Chad: September 2012. Zakaria Ibrahim, Brahim Khamis, Daoud Aldjouma, Djibrine Adoum Goudja, and Idriss Adoum—all dead, gunned down during dawn prayers. Where? North of Zakouma National Park in Chad, central Africa. When? September 3, 2012. Why? They were assassinated for protecting the last of the elephant herds found in the vast stretches between the Sahara Desert and the Congo forest.

When Fay first worked on surveys in Zakouma National Park seven years ago there were 3,885 elephants. A year later 800 or so of them had vanished. That was nothing. As he writes “In 2009 the number was down to 617. Today there are 457 elephants in Zakouma.”

In Fay’s post there is a simple link to his earlier story. All you have to do is click on the well-known National Geographic cover image to get his story titled Ivory Wars 

There are ivory poaching stories coming out of several other African countries. Among them are Kenya, Tanzania and the more western forest countries like the DRC, Gabon and Cameroon. As I have written before, in some cases it has been the meat that was the main target, but there is no doubt that ivory still plays a huge role.

Several people have argued that we need to get at the end point of the poaching, the consumers, and there is plenty of evidence that a huge proportion of this demand comes from China. It is not just ivory. In a country with an alleged 95 billionaires and over a million millionaires, along with a long history of the consumption of wildlife, why should we be able to stop their cultural norms? Think tiger farms, think shark’s fin soup, think hardwoods, and so on, almost ad infinitum.

Fay writes that a friend of his said  “In China if you somehow managed to convince 99.9 percent of the population not to buy ivory, that 0.1 percent who remain unconvinced represents 1.3 million people still wanting to buy ivory.”

He wrapped his piece with.

“That’s three times more people than there are elephants left in Africa.”