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.

Inca buildings and Machu Picchu

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 A shrine to enduring love- a world's wonder

Our trip to Peru had many highlights. Of course the reason we went was to fulfill one of my wife’s lifelong ambitions, to see the ancient site at Machu Picchu. She was born and raised in India and we had visited the Taj Mahal together in 1985. One can read about Shah Jahan’s shrine to his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal and look at many pictures, but actually being there takes the experience to a new level. The pictures simply do not do its ethereal beauty any kind of justice.

I had of course heard of Machu Picchu and knew that it had been built by the Incas and not discovered and destroyed by the Spaniards. I had also seen pictures of the site, mainly the famous one shown on tourist material that gives a view from a high point, with a sharply peaked mountain in the background.

It was time to do some reading and as usual before a big trip we took out a Lonely Planet book from our local Saskatoon Public Library. Their picture shows how complex and amazing the site really is.

Before we headed to what is probably Peru’s most famous spot we had the good fortune to spend a few days in the city of Cuzco. The main reason I had been pleased that our itinerary with the excellent Intrepid Company made this stop was the matter of altitude. The elevation at Machu Picchu’s high point is 2430 m (almost 8,000ft). That was going to be hard enough for prairie dwellers. For the last five years of our Kenya days we had lived in a small cottage on the weirdly named Lunatic Lane in Nanyuki at 1905m (6250 ft.). While there my doctor wife had seen a number of cases of altitude sickness some of them fatal, mainly in young, very fit military men who had ascended Mt. Kenya all too quickly and been overcome. I had seen a couple of cases of the same thing in cattle living around the 2500m mark. Cuzco is quite a bit higher at 3400m (11,200ft). If we could acclimatize to that, even a little bit, then Jo’s main goal should / would be no problem.

We were in for a surprise. Our guidebook mentioned that Cuzco is the ancient capital of the Inca kingdom and indeed we saw many fascinating things, both in and around the city. What struck me, more than anything else, was the stonework. It was explained to us by our charming and excellent guide Patricia who took five years of university to become a registered guide.

Detail of stone joints

Sacsaywaman, aka "SexyWoman"

While the huge rocks at sites like Sacsaywaman are amazing both for their sheer size and the fact that they must have been fitted after months or maybe years of shaping (you could not hope to slide a credit card between them, and there is no mortar), it was the intricate moulding and shaping in the Qorikancha church, which lies in the city centre, that really caught my eye. Maybe that is because I am a sometime woodworker and have some idea of the challenges, say in making a chess table. I have lots of fancy tools to make things fit. Seven hundred years ago the artisans who built these things did not have quite as much :) 

Qorikancha has several types of stone lock

One type of lock

 As you can see from the photos they used several different patterns to make the stones both fit and lock. Again no mortar. If the archaeologists and historians are correct, the stonemasons used hematite  to grind the granite-like rocks. Wow! Is probably the least one can say. 

A partly opened wall showing diffefrent locked stones

Of course the church is sadly more famous for what is missing than for what remains. The Spaniards removed many tonnes of solid gold sheets and sculptures, melted them down and shipped them back across the Atlantic via what is today Panama.

Patricia explained the likely reason for this intricate work. It was to earthquake-proof the buildings. There have been many (at least 40) such seismic events since the first recorded one in 1586. Patricia mentioned the 7.0 Richter scale one in 1950 that occurred right in the Cuzco region. 

Long before that the Inca builders had worked out that the interlocking stones and trapezoid doors and windows protected their buildings against the hearth’s shakings. Indeed, where the conquering Spanish had destroyed all but the bases of the old temples their newly built churches sometimes collapsed, leaving the older walls intact.

So, with excitement and anticipation we headed off by bus and train to Jo’s dream site. There we saw more amazing stonework. 

Temple of the sun – east and south-facing windows

The detail at the most important religious spot, the temple of the sun, is just as intricate at that at Qorikancha, as is the work at the House of the High Priest. At most other spots it is less crafted but just as robust.

The terraces for agriculture and their retaining walls all lie facing towards the rising sun. All those workers, for all those years, needed food. A real example of home-grown! Patricia told us that recent work has shown that most of the structure, some 60%, lies underground in the foundations. 

Descending tanks, all feedng one another

Intihuatana - see the hitch at right

An important part of the structures is the Hitching Post of the Sun (Intihuatana) which was used by astronomers to predict solstices. Water too was a vital part of the complex - the tanks at right all feed one another.

Anno domini, dodgy knees and rain-soaked stones forced us to adopt the discretion is the better part of valour approach to the last steep climb up to the hut of the caretaker of the funerary rock at the very top of the ancient site where those iconic photos are taken. Luckily group member Arran Smith, a newly minted vet (qualified almost 49 years after me!) shared his own pictures. He caught this one just before the clouds descended and obscured the wonderful view.

Arran’s view - thanks Arran!

Just like the Taj, none of the pictures does any sort of justice to the experience of being there.

Moray – an Agricultural Research Centre From the Ages.

My wife Jo and I have just returned from a memorable trip to Ecuador and Peru.

We organized our trip with the Intrepid company and they looked after us very well. Of course our main objectives were to visit the Galapagos Islands and Machu Picchu. They were indeed stunning, fascinating and thoroughly worthwhile. There was more that we had not expected.

On an outing near Cuzco, in Peru our charming and very well informed guide, Patricia, gave us the option of taking a side-trip to an extraordinary site that dates back at least 2,000 years. It is called Moray.

Once you leave the excellent tarred road the track to the site is a bit dodgy, but there were crews working on the mud and potholes with heavy machinery and we got through.

The extraordoinary 2000 year old site at Moray

There are three amphitheatre-like depressions in the natural contours of the hills, and each has been developed into what looks, at first sight, like an enormous set of bleachers. If the archaeologists have it right they had nothing to do with sport or performance art, but everything to do with agriculture and ag research.

The best preserved of them, the main one shown to tourists, has over twenty terraced levels. The most remarkable feature is that the temperature range between the top and bottom of the structure is 15°C (about 59°F for the unconverted). 

Steps for right and left foot climbers

That is not all. At every level the ancient builders made sure that workers with bad knees, like me, could get up an down to till the land using steps set in the walls. They also thought about irrigation. 

My arrow shows the top water channel

A line of water courses, set one above the other, descends throughout the structure. If you take a close look at this picture on the left you can see a rectangular ruin at the bottom. This is not an old and mis-shapen tennis court, but the foundation of what was almost certainly a storage house. Patricia had never had a guest suggest the tennis idea, but it was fun to see her double take.

Checking me out - but I don't know his name.

As I sat and admired the view this little character, about the size of a house sparrow or a chickadee, came and sat on the adjacent agave plant no more than a couple of metres away. I could not resist! I have scanned through the first ten Google sites on the query “Birds of Peru”, but maybe this fellow is simply too “normal” to get mention or take up disc space. Any expert birders out there?

Our June 2013 Lonely Planets  guidebook has a brief description of the Moray site and tells us that the entry fee is $10. By February it had risen to $15. Still a bargain at the price.

What an amazing place. Thank goodness we took that side trip.

Bushmeat and the African Trade to Europe

Last week I was in Peru and met an experienced airline steward who has flown with major airlines for many years into, and more to the point, out of several West African capitals. We got chatting about the bushmeat situation, something I have written about in books and on blogs for several years.
 

One of Amman's many pictures of the bushmeat trade

Of course writers with bigger followings, like the remarkable Karl Amman have written and photographed bushmeat and poaching stories to a wide audience. He also graciously allowed me to use some of his images in my book The Trouble With Lions .

The late Anna Mertz, who worked as an engineer in West Africa for many years reported on the horror show of truck loads of dead and badly injured antelopes appearing almost in food markets in Ghana long before the bushmeat trade issue reached a wider global audience.

My steward acquaintance told me that loads of bushmeat continue to come out of Africa bound for the UK with every flight. It is packed in passenger luggage, and the security officers who check bags before departure have no interest in, and probably no jurisdiction over it.  They are concerned with weapons.

The airplane staff can do little about it either. They do try to curtail the excess baggage situation, but even that is a hopeless task, as the routine response from Nigerian passengers is that a white-skinned staff member is picking on a black person. Inevitably some of the bags leak their contents and many planes end up with bloodstains and bad smells.

In Kenya Ann Olivecrona told me how she chanced to witness a bushmeat import at London’s Heathrow airport. As I wrote in 2008:

“in May 2004 she witnessed an amazing interchange involving bushmeat at London’s Heathrow airport. Her plane happened to arrive at more or less the same time as a flight from Lagos. During the time that she watched the procession, customs officials stopped every one of the Nigerian passengers and asked for the huge suitcases to be opened. Almost all were packed with smoked bushmeat.”

The bushmeat trade poses serious risks at both ends.

In Africa it is leading the rapid depletion of wildlife populations. Many species are involved. While primates are the most evocative for most people, the most popular species is the cane rat of the genus Thryonomys, known locally as cutting grass. They can weigh as much as 10 kg in the wild and in most West Africa countries efforts have been made to rear them for the meat market.  

Credit: Aurélia Zizo/Wikipedia

Here is a picture from the Wiki of one such rat, a male Greater Cane Rat (Thryonomys swinderianus) in a breeding station in Owendo, Gabon. 

Many tribes in the region have long held certain species taboo. Not any more. Anything goes.  One example is the African buffalo, long deemed off limits to one clan in Ghana. In October 2001 Ghanaian journalist Vivian Baah wrote a series of articles under the title “Guess What’s Cooking for Dinner?” in the Evening News of Accra. She related how in parts of Ghana:

“among the Ekona clan of the Ashanti's, it is a taboo to kill the Ekuo (buffalo). But these days, the members of this clan themselves are the worst offenders. Having turned their backs on the taboo, they now butcher the Ekuo with cheeky ease.”

Cape buffalo - aka Ekuo in Ghana

Of course this process will inevitably lead to the law of diminishing returns. Species will simply disappear or become rare.

In Europe there are serious disease risks. Much of the continent has an endemic foot-and-mouth disease status. If the disease gets into UK, for instance, it will cause billions of dollars worth of economic damage. All it needs is for some improperly preserved meat to carry the virus to destination. A little bad luck or carelessness and the explosion would take place. If this seems unlikely one only has to look at my home province of Saskatchewan, where, in 1952, illegally imported smoked meat from Poland led to the last outbreak of FMD.

Fruit bats roositng in Uganda

 

It is not just livestock diseases. Ebola and the closely related and equally deadly Marburg virus can infect humans who handle primate and fruit bat carcasses (fruit bats are a popular bushmeat item).

 HIV/Aids came to humans via chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys. No doubt there are other examples.

In a TTWL chapter titled Bushmeat and Bureaucrats I tried to make the point that thousands of words on paper would achieve nothing much. One example of such verbiage came from the European parliament. A tome from that body that took four years to reach “Provisional Edition” status came out in 2004.

Bureaucrats the world over are famous for producing complex, usually lengthy documents about almost any subject one can think of. The more pen pushers involved the more complex the end product. Only this human sub-species could have come up with the title “EuropeanParliament resolution on Petition 461/2000 concerning the protection andconservation of Great Apes and other species endangered by the illegal trade inbushmeat (2003/2078(INI).” 

The material has ten “Having regards to” clauses, fifteen appearances of “Whereas,” and twenty-one “Urges” and the like, a few with sub-clauses. There are no teeth to the document, just urges.

It is obvious, from my airline steward’s account, that the teeth are either absent or false.

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.