Indian elephant in Sri Lanka - The Good and the Bad.

 In 2010 my wife, her sister and I visited Sri Lanka as tourists and soon found ourselves going to many temples and Stupas around the country. Inevitably we also ended up at places where we saw animals. In some ways the most interesting was the elephant orphanage at Pinnawala where we saw many rescued elephants and their offspring.

  

I learned a few interesting facts from the Wikipedia document about the sanctuary. The Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage was first established by the Sri Lankan Department of Wildlife Conservation in 1975 for feeding and providing care and sanctuary to orphaned baby elephants that were found in the wild. The orphanage was first located at the Wilpattu National Park, then shifted to the tourist complex at Bentota and then to the Dehiwala Zoo. From the Zoo it was shifted to Pinnawala village on a 25-acre (10 ha) coconut plantation adjacent to the Maha Oya River.

We were intrigued and impressed by some of the things they were doing. Perhaps the most impressive of all was the care and attention devoted to the big blind bull named Raja.

A  nice spray in the heat of the day

another trunk rest

Here he is being sprayed down. Note the way he is resting his trunk on one of his large tusks.He later switched sides for another rest.

Traffic hold up

The elephants are taken for a daily bath to the Maha Oya river that lies a couple of hundred metres from the front gate of the sanctuary. To reach the river they have to cross a main road and while the procession marches the traffic is held up.

An individual bath. ? Heaven?

 

 There are a few interesting YouTube videos of the bathing. Here is one such 7 minute version posted by “Jonsy Boy”.

Some the elephants at the sanctuary arrived as a consequence of the long war that finally resulted in the subjugation of the Tamil minority who mostly live in the north of the country.  

Sama and her problems

  

One such victim was a female, named Sama, who lost her front right leg to a land mine. She can still walk but inevitably her gait is slow and she has a huge upward curve to her spine and twisted left front leg, presumably to shift the weight to her hind legs and thatc one forelimb.

Sama is last to cross, but she makes it!

However she joins the river-bound group for her daily bath.         

Breeding sucess

The program at the orphanage inevitably involves breeding (there are several males younger that Raja, so biology 101 kicks in. This general scene show the results of such activity and is back grounded by the coconut plantation where the herd was finally located.  

  More from the wiki site. The first birth at Pinnawala was in 1984, Sukumalee, a female was born to Vijaya and Kumar who were aged 21 and 20 years respectively at the time. The males Vijaya and Neela and females Kumari, Anusha, Mathalie and Komali have since then parented several baby elephants. More than twenty-three elephants were born from 1984 to 1991. In 1998 there were fourteen births at Pinnawala, eight males and six females, with one second generation birth in early 1998. Since then till early 2012, 84 more were born at Pinnawala.

            What we did not know at the time of our visit, and was of course not told us was the ugly story of what happens to the results of all that successful breeding over the years. Again a quote from the Wiki site. Quality of care of elephants who are donated or sold away from Pinnawala has been a big public issue. In 2012 The Sri Lanka Environment Trust spoke out against authorities who continue to 'donate' tamed elephants to people who had 'poor' past records of taking care of animals. "There are enough cases to show that the authorities are releasing elephants from Pinnawala to the same group of people who don't take care of the animals." Though officials boast that the animals are under close surveillance, they don't do any monitoring once an elephant is released to a private owner.

Those interested in the conservation of elephants are well aware the most of the Facebook posts and attention are devoted to the African elephant which is undergoing massive destruction across the continent as the price of ivory spirals almost of control mainly going to China. Paula Kahumbu of Kenya has been a very active in the anti-poaching campaign and you can easily find her many posts on Facebook. I have a few posts in this blog series about the ivory trade.

There have been a few posts about the Chinese end of the marketing chain, but I have a suspicion that the authorities in that country have no concern about this issue and with so many ivory carving factories there they may even be actively encouraging it.

Will Raja and his huge tusks fall victim to that greed?  Nasty thought, but it will come as no surprise if he does. The price of ivory has risen four-fold in four years. Tempting.

Elephants, Ivory, Africa and China #2

This posting may have better news on the ivory crisis. Hope so.

Let’s start with this from the online group One Green Planet. It opens with

Many never thought they’d see the day come, but it finally has – China, one of the world’s largest importers of ivory, has announced, that it, along with 29 other nations, will help protect the world’s elephants by criminalizing poaching.

Now, that’s something to celebrate.

A Space For Giants newsletter of December rejoices in the growing tide of goodwill and scale of responses to the elephant/ivory story.

Three days ago I posted on a small part of the ugly mess of the current ivory crisis (not the first) as this 1983 book title indicates. 

For good reviews of this very long-standing issue get hold of either this book by Ian Parker and the late Mohamend Amin  or Ian Parker’s more recent What I Tell You Three Times is True. The latter is a really in-depth examination of the subject.

There has been a considerable amount of social media traffic on many aspects of it. I have picked up some thirty postings in the last month alone. Like the two I opened with about half of them take a slightly different and hopefully more optimistic view of the situation, many of them reporting seizures of ivory, either as raw tusks or worked items. Others deal with criminal trials.

In South Africa, where rhino poaching is a major concern, they are preparing for the elephant war with publicity. This video is well worth the watching. Indeed if you have time for nothing else do spend the ten minutes with it.

Namibia is also being pro-active and investing in technology 

that includes drones, infra-red cameras, tagging with GPS, and the latest software.

There have been recent reports from other African countries such as Gabon, Kenya, Republic of Congo (2 reports) and Mozambique. 

Tanzania has a real battle on its hands, as indicated by the actions that have recently been taken. They include ivory seizures in Zanzibar and Dar esSalaam The dismissal of many allegedly corrupt wildlife department staff  and several other columns in the on-line allAfrica news that include a call to deal with the  so-called Poaching Barons as well as a call for tougher poaching laws.

Kenya also seems to be taking things more seriously, not only with the new laws I mentioned in the blog of Jan 7 but in catching offenders (again two reports.)

In that Jan 7 post I mentioned that a new law, if signed by President Uhuru Kenyatta, will make it possible to punish poachers with life sentences. A remarkable public admission was made on Jan 3 by a former employee of the Lewa Conservancy. Keleshi Parkusaa, 39, said he has been a poacher even when he was employed there for three years. He obviously admitted his crimes before the law comes into effect in order to avoid that sentence.

Other countries that have taken action are France where 3 tonnes of ivory are to be burned. This picture by Reuters/Keith Bedford shows some of the items. Also Vietnam, where a court has sentenced a company director and his deputy to 3 years in jail each for smuggling 158 pieces of ivory tusks weighing more than 2.4 tons.

And the USA where a  New York City antiques dealer who pleaded guilty to conspiracy for smuggling artifacts made from rhinoceros horns from the U.S. to China and Hong Kong has been sentenced to three years in prison, plus three years’ supervised release.

The key, as everyone realizes, is China.

Basket ball star Yao Ming has been actively campaigning about conservation issues for quite some time and his efforts to publicize the shark’s fin soup issue has yielded encouraging results. He has been similarly active on the ivory front and his and other peoples efforts may be changing the way that folks in China think about these issues.

This anti-elephant poaching story filed from Kenya and Mozambique by Yuan Duanduan titled The Blood Ivory: Behind the Largest Ivory Smuggling Cases in China has gone viral.

In it he wrote

China has become the largest illegal ivory consumer market in the world, but 2 /3 of the Chinese people do not know ivory is obtained through killing the elephant.
The ivory trade has become a source of capital for African terrorist groups, forming a tight secretive network of poachers, small and big middlemen.
In recent news on November 5, 2013, Xiamen Customs announced the largest ivory smuggling cases uncovered in recent years, two cases of which ivory added up to 11.88 tons, worth 603 million yuan. If it hadn’t been seized, the ivory from Africa would have infiltrated China ‘s secretive “black market”, to be eventually sold into private collections.

As of Dec 20 the story had over 10 million Tweets and Retweets on Weibo (China’s Twitter/Facebook hybrid) 

"The article was reposted on 24 online discussion forums or Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) including Mop and Tianya, two of the most popular in China. Thousands of comments were generated on the Tianya BBS forum alone. Overall over 5,000 comments on the article were posted on Weibo, BBS fora, and other websites."

A very clever ploy was to merge the image of China’s iconic panda with the shape of an elephant.  This poster, courtesy of WildAid reads: Protect the pandas of Africa - elephants. When the buying stops the killing can too.

Then came the Jan 6 report of the crushing of 6 tonnes of ivory in Guangzhou and on the same day a senior government administrator's answers to questions from reporters Liu Yang Yang, Wang Xi, Han Qiao about that destruction 

I fear that only very cautious optimism should be felt. One of the several concerned groups Elephant Advocacy had these thoughts about the ivory crush.

  

While it's encouraging to see China, the world's key consumer of ivory, taking such a step, there would be even more grounds for celebration if it didn't attempt to isolate 'illegal' ivory as the problem while actively promoting a deeply flawed parallel trade in 'legal' ivory which serves to confuse consumers, boost demand and provide a laundering mechanism for illegal ivory. It's difficult, too, to see beyond today's event as a PR exercise when considering that the 6.2 tonnes of ivory crushed represents a small fraction of what we know has been seized in China.

The future?

One of the problems is that nobody really knows the real number s of elephants in Africa. CITES reports probably give the most reliable figures, but even they are inevitably fraught with estimates and inaccuracies. The news that Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire has announced that he will fund a pan-African survey is a huge step in the right direction. The will aim to calculate how many actually remain, where they are found, what threats they face and whether their total population numbers are in fact increasing or decreasing.

Elephants, Ivory, Africa and China #1

Warning! This is not a good news posting.

Anyone who follows Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter links that cover wildlife issues cannot fail to have seen the remarkable number of posts since December 1^st about the utter disaster that is going on across all African states where elephants are found. Indeed, in some cases one can probably write where elephants used to roam. What a mess! 

The news has gone well beyond the social media scene and this scanned-in report in the Guardian, that I picked up in UK last week,  may have brought it to the attention of many others.  Sadly that is very unlikely to make a jot of difference to those who are engaged in the slaughter elephants and the use of their teeth for human pleasure.

A really authoritative 19-page report by a team from three main conservation groups (CITES Secretariat, IUCN / SSC African Elephant Specialist Group and TRAFFIC International sums it up nicely.

It is titled: Status of African elephant populations and levels of illegal killing and the illegal trade in ivory. 

The report deals with the 2012 situation and a few years prior.  A key sentence in the executive summary tells the sorry tale of the why?  

"Poverty and weak governance in elephant range States, together with demand for illegal ivory in consuming nations, are the three key factors identified by repeated MIKE analyses, including this one, as being most strongly associated with observed poaching trends."

Of the many reports in December 2013 that fit this picture I suppose the ones out of Tanzania are as good an example as any. The Prime Minister Jakaya Kikwete sacked four of his cabinet for what was reported as overzealous use of control measures in the so-called Operation Tokomeza.

Within two days the operation was restarted after a container load of ivory reputedly destined for China was seized at the Dar es Salaam port.

It may be that the situation in Tanzania is the worst in Africa. A posting by Richard Conniff of Dec 18 is titled Elephant Poaching: The Disaster in Tanzania says a lot.

Conniff’s post is either terrifying or beggars belief. He states that “Apparently, managing the media means keeping these results as quiet as possible.” So he quotes from none other than the National Geographic about the number of elephants in the Selous Game reserve alone. The latest, recently announced population estimate is 13,084. This indicates an unprecedented decline of nearly 80 percent over the last six years. For the mathematically disinclined that is a drop from 55,000 since 2007.

The numbers of elephants poached throughout Africa in 2012 are telling enough. The report, which is based on sound studies, gives an estimate of some 15,000 animals but acknowledges that:

Monitoring of elephant populations, apart from at a few well-monitored sites, is sporadic and inconsistent. The low precision of most estimates makes it difficult to detect any immediate repercussion on elephant numbers in the short-term but this does not mean there are no changes.

That is just 2012. There are no properly monitored figures for 2013, but none of the many claims gives a figure lower than 25K. The most dire claim comes from the International Fund for Animals Welfare who suggest that up to “50,000 elephants a year are now being slaughtered.”  In this post on Dec 20  they stated that more than 41 tonnes of elephant ivory have been seized in 2013, the largest quantity in 25 years.

Whether the situation has really “shocked world leaders out of their ennui and into action to halt poaching and ivory trafficking” is real or hoped for is more questionable.

Other postings mention numbers like 25 or 30,000 but all these numbers exceed any possible replacement numbers and all are horrific. Of course the use of cyanide at salt licks is nasty, but the wholesale mowing down of the sentient, intelligent creatures with automatic weapons is probably nastier. In the cyanide case, the affected animals will have died quickly and probably known little of what was happening to their herd mates. With a hail of bullets smashing into bone, lungs, hearts and brains many of the elephants will have been very well aware of what was happening.

Having written this last paragraph from the heart I am horrified to think that I could opine that cyanide was a better way to die than by gunfire. 

The Kenya government seems to have lifted themselves off their collective backsides and taken action. If the new Wildlife Conservation and Management Bill 2013 is signed into law by the president a life sentenced may be handed down for anyone convicted of rhino or elephant poaching.

 

At the other end of the trade chain a Dec 22 post from the South China Morning Post makes it clear that the Chinese do not seem to share the opinion of the Kenyans. 

Wildlife conservationists slammed a four-month jail term and fines of up to HK$80,000 for five ivory smugglers from the mainland as “too lenient”, saying it will do little to stop the illicit trade. (HK $  = 0.13 US$).

“It is way too lenient because Chinese people buying illicit ivory in Africa know that if they are caught, at most they will just lose the ivory and get a puny fine,” said Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia regional director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
“Tom Milliken, of the wildlife group TRAFFIC, said while he welcomed the jail term as a deterrent, fines could be written off as “the price of doing business”.”

He is probably right. Another post of Dec 22, this one by Simon Parry tells us that the price of ivory in Hong Kong has risen 50-fold in the last 10 years. Not surprisingly big tusks sell at a premium. Parry gives an example of a 65kg pair of mounted tusks is on sale for HK$15 million [almost US $ 2 million] at Chinese Arts and Crafts in Wan Chai.

As described in this post of Dec 13 by Emily Matchar what the rest of the world knows as illegal ivory is called white gold in Hong Kong. With an increasingly wealthy Chinese middle class seeking status symbols does the elephant have a chance? Then of course there are the 270 odd Chinese billionaires (that is not a typo; It is B, not M).

I could go on, as I have only mentioned a small proportion of the December posts, but this one should give some flavour to those who have not been following the situation closely. Anyway, I have just gone over my one thousand word limit.

Efforts to Stop the Ivory Crisis

There have been a few concerted efforts to get the Chinese people onside about the devastation being wreaked on Africa’s elephants. It’s an idea that may have come a little late, but has at least come. It is to use Chinese media to relay the information. One story that appeared on Facebook showed renowned elephant researcher and advocate Ian Douglas-Hamilton riding with Chinese journalists in the back of a safari vehicle as they rode through Samburu National Reserve.

Kenya’s Daily Nation news organization has joined the efforts. In an online article a Tourism ministry spokesman was quoted after speaking to the reporters.

“We have a beautiful country with beautiful animals. But we have a problem with poaching and soon we won’t have these animals,” the ministry’s deputy secretary, Mr Patrick Gakure, told the reporters.

The response was encouraging. The delegation promised to inform people at home.

“We would love to make Kenya the Number One destination for Chinese tourists. We have a large population of 1.3 billion, and if just one per cent of this visit Kenya, that means very many people,” Mr Aaron Sze, the chairman of Glamorous-Kenya, a Chinese marketing and travel agency, said.

At the ”consumer” end it appears that Yao Ming, the iconic and very popular basketball star is making an impact.

An email that came to me from Zach Weismann of WildAid on April 16^th was headlined:

Yao Ming Says No to Ivory and Rhino Horn.  

Photo credit Liu Ranran

With the message was a picture of the star at a table with several other folks backed by a huge banner. I have included the picture, taken by Liu Ranran here. The email is too long to reproduce in a blog and I could not find a useful link to it, but it sends a message of hope. Three organizations are involved in the efforts. They are WildAid, the African Wildlife Foundation, and Save The Elephants.

The email provides results of two surveys conducted in China. They are both revealing and chilling. A survey conducted in November of 2012 in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou by the Chinese research company, HorizonKey, found that:

•   More than half of the nearly 1,000 participants (over 50%) do not think elephant poaching is common;

•   34%, or one in three respondents, believe ivory is obtained from natural elephant mortality;

•   Only 33% of all participants believe elephants are poached for their tusks; and

•   94% of residents agree the “Chinese government should impose a ban on the ivory trade.”

Meanwhile, a similar survey conducted by HorzionKey in the same three major Chinese cities on rhino horn perceptions found that:

•   66% of all participants, that is two out of every three respondents, are not aware that rhino horn comes from poached rhinos;

•   Nearly 50% believed rhino horn can be legally purchased from official stores; and

•   95% of residents agree the “Chinese government should take stricter action to prevent use of rhino horns.”

The media can no doubt make Chinese people more aware of the issues, but it is the two figures at the end of the surveys that are chilling. They indicate that only 94% and 95% of people think that stricter action is needed. As the population of China is about 1.3 billion that means that something like 78 million DO NOT THINK THAT SUCH ACTION IS NEEDED. That is over twice the population of Canada.

There is another and very sorry side to this story that comes out of Kenya. It has to do with the penalties of ivory smuggling.

There is no doubt that the fines handed down to ivory traffickers in Kenya would not even qualify as a slap on the wrist. Paula Kahumbu is the Executive Director of Wildlife Direct. She is a powerful conservation voice and active on Twitter (you can follow her @paulakahumbu). She has reported on a case that was tried on April 19. The accused was a Vietnamese man named Nguyen Viet Truong Phong. He pleaded guilty. The magistrate fined the man a total of Ksh 40,000. The ivory he was trafficking was worth Ksh 5.7 million. To save you the bother of figuring out these numbers in dollars here they are. The value: $70,000. The fine: $489. He was released after paying the fine.

No wonder Paula wrote “I drive home in a state of shock. I feel devastated. No matter how much we invest in anti-poaching and dealing, no matter how many more poachers, dealers, traffickers we arrest, it makes no difference. The courts are letting them off with miniscule fines.”

This was not the only ridiculous fine. Another Facebook posting, this one from a group called Elephant Advocacy reported that Chinese National Tian Yi, was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and pleaded guilty to possession of 439 pieces of worked ivory weighing 16.6 kg; ivory which might fetch as much as USD$16,000 in China. The Magistrate fined him a paltry KSH.30,000/- which works out to less than USD $350. It is clear that the problem of enforcement is now with the Kenyan courts of law.

Kenya’s new president Uhuru Kenyatta made a recent speech about the need for greater awareness of his country’s wildlife heritage, but nothing has yet emerged from that plea. Paula Kahumbu finished her piece with this

 

Today’s ruling was a wake-up call for all of us. It is going to take more than nice speeches by His Excellency President Uhuru Kenyatta to turn this situation around. Otherwise, our elephants are doomed.

Anohter Yao Ming poster, but I could not find a name to credit

Let’s hope that Yao Ming’s efforts can push those numbers way way up. 100%?

Wouldn’t that be nice.

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