IVORY AND ELEPHANTS POACHING | Facts and Details

IVORY

For centuries elephants have been hunted and poached for their ivory. African elephants have traditionally been a bigger source of ivory than Asian elephants because their tusks are considerably larger and have more ivory; both males and females have tusks (only male Asian elephants have them); and Asian elephants were considered more valuable as living working animals than dead sources of ivory. In some cases ivory has been taken from tusks sawed off

Most of the poached ivory found its way to Belgium, Hong Kong and Japan where ivory carvers, lathes and saws turn the raw tusks into jewelry, figurines and piano keys. One elephant tusk produces three billiard balls; two tusks provides enough ivory for a piano.

Much of the ivory in Japan is used for making signature seals, hanko, which Japanese used put their stamp on documents and papers the same way Westerners sign their names. When the Japanese economy was at its beak in the 1980s, ivory hanko were such a status symbol they primary destination of elephant tusk ivory. Forty percent of the ivory poached from Africa n the 1980s ended up in Japan, compared to 15 percent in the United States and 20 percent in Europe.←

African have always valued ivory which they say has is capable of protecting the wearers from evil spirits and curing them of illness. Ivory earrings and pendants are often adorned with dot and and circle designs that represent the "good eye." Ivory is not the only material taken from elephants. Elephant tail hair is used for making bracelets. [Source: Angela Ficher, National Geographic, November 1984]

In Thailand, laws allow for limited trade in ivory, but policing is difficult and Thailand remains a hub for ivory carving.

Elephant Poaching in the 1980s

Africa's elephant population was estimated at between 5 million and 10 million before white hunters came to the continent with European colonization. In the old days elephants were sometimes hunted by encircling a herd with fire. After the animals burned to death their tusks were harvested.

Massive poaching for the ivory trade in the 1980s halved the remaining number of African elephants to about 600,000. In the decade before the 1989 ban on the ivory trade Africa’s elephant population fell from 1.3 million to 600,000. In the 15 years before the ban Kenya lost 85 per cent of its elephants.

The decline in the number of elephants has been shocking: Uganda was once the home of 20,000 elephants. In 1989 it had only 1,600. Uganda’s Kabalega Falls National Park had over 8,000 elephants in 1966. By the time unruly soldiers and heavily armed poachers were through in 1980 there were only 160 very frightened animals left. In Kenya the numbers dropped from 140,000 in 1970 to 16,000 in 1989. In the same time period there was a a decline from 250,000 animals to 61,000 in Tanzania. [Source: Douglas Chadwick, National Geographic, May 1991]

Greatly accelerating the number of elephants taken was the increased presence of firearms. In the 1980s Africa had ten times as many weapons, many of them powerful automatic rifles, than it had in the 1960s. Elephants were mercilessly killed with automatic weapons in the Idi Amin and post-Idi Amin eras in Uganda in the 1970s and 1980s. Douglas-Hamilton landed inside Uganda's Kabalega Falls National Park in 1980 and counted 78 carcasses only 58 live animals. More than 1,000 elephants were killed there. The killing was done by both soldiers loyal to Amin and those that opposed him who came afterwards. The rangers guarding the park earned six dollars a month and had only one working vehicle. ∈

Many of the poachers in Kenya's parks in the 1980s were tough bush bandits armed with AK-47 assault rifles. Chadwick helped a bloodstained German tourist onto a rescue plane after he had been shot by poachers only a mile away from where Chadwick had been watching giraffes earlier. These same poachers more or less closed down Meru National Park and Mount Elgon National Park near Uganda and made it necessary for tourists to have an armed escort.←

Elephant poachers in Thailand sometimes went after tame elephants, either killing them or stunning them with a high-voltage cattle prod, and then sawing off the tusks. Even when they stunned the elephants they might well just killed the animal, because the sometimes they sawed so close to base of the tusk root, it caused severe nerve damages and the animal died a pain death from infection.←

In Africa poachers often hacked of half of an elephant's refrigerator-size head to get at the roots of the tusks. Some carcasses look like they have been splattered with white paint as a result of the all vulture droppings. With the price of ivory running above $200 a kilograms in the 1980s and park rangers making only $20 a month it was no surprise that they participated in the poaching and even wildlife ministers reaped great sums from the ivory trade.

Consequences of Elephant Poaching in the 1980s and Efforts to Combat It

Pouching in the 1980s has led to the death of many wild elephants. Both sexes were hunted for their hides and teeth and males were especially prized for their ivory. So many males were poached in southern India that females still significantly outnumber males there.

Tsavo National Park in Kenya was devastaed by poachers. In the 1970s there were 20,000 elephants in Tsavo. By 1990 there were perhaps a thousand. Describing the decline naturalist Iain Douglas Hamilton said, "As the big tuskers disappeared , poachers turned to females. Bang! there went the reproducing part of the population — and its learned traditions involving migratory routes, dry season water sources, and so on. The whole society began to collapse. Now you see leaderless bands of sub-adults orphans. The gathering of these last groups into terrified herds of refugees. Always on the move. Poachers close behind.←

After the slaughter the elephants in Tsavo National Park fled once they got the scent of humans. Chadwick watched a group of 600 elephants feed at a water hole in Tsavo, when the wind changed and carried his scent in their direction the three million ton mass sped off into the bush as if they had seen a ghost.←

Often times the park rangers that fought the poachers were equipped World War I, bolt-action rifles while the better equipped poachers possessed AK-47s and high-powered rifles. Things changed in Kenya when Richard Leakey, son of the famous anthropologist, became head of Kenya's Wildlife Service in 1989. He outfit his anti-poaching units not only automatic weapons, but also witj helicopter gunships and shoot to kill orders. As of 1991 over a 100 poachers had been killed.←

In a dramatic move that received quite a bit of publicity worldwide Kenya's president Daniel arap Moi gave the order to burn over 2,500 elephant turks, worth an estimated $3 million.

Ivory Ban and Containment of Elephant Poaching

In 1989, after sharp declines of elephant populations in Africa, with most of the animals poached for their ivory, a worldwide ivory ban was imposed that was agreed upon by 105 of 110 nation members of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The ivory ban, aggressive anti-poaching measures and media attention on the plight of elephants were largely successful in helping to restore elephant populations in Africa but had less impact on Asian elephants. Demand for ivory and the price of ivory has dropped, and there less incentive for poachers to kill elephants.

Following the 1989 ban on ivory trade and concerted international efforts to protect the animals, elephant herds in east and southern Africa made a dramatic come back. The number of elephants in Kenya increased 60 percent — from 16,000 to 26,000 animals — between 1989 and 1993. The elephant population in Kenya stabilized at around 25,000 and the number of poaching deaths was reduced from 3,000 in 1989 to 20 in 1994. [Source: Susan Okie, Washington Post, December 27, 1993]

Poaching was not a big problem in the 1990s and early 2000s but it continues. Many countries were overrun with elephants. Malawi, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe had herds that were so large the animals had to be culled to prevent destruction of the land. Elephants tore down trees, trampled fields and generally made a nuisance of themselves. Park rangers wanted to cull the elephant herds and use money generated from ivory sales to finance wildlife programs.

End of the Ivory Ban

In June 1997, at a CITES meeting elephants were taken of the endangered list in a secret-ballot and the eight-year ivory ban was ended in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, allowing these countries sell stockpiled ivory as well as elephant meat and hides and live elephants to zoos. According to the deal all their stockpiled ivory (maybe 120 tons) in those countries was sold to Japan in a tightly controlled operation to make sure no poached ivory entered the market. Worldwide the estimated of stockpiles ivory in 1996 were as high as 500 to 600 tons.

At that time there was a stable population of around 150,00 elephants in Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Many conservationists went along with the controversial proposals because money raised from the ivory sales was directed to animal conservation and payments to farmers and villagers that live around wild animals to provide them with compensation for lost animals and revenues from tourism and hunting to help them develop an interest in preserving the animals.

Botswana president Ketumil Masire called efforts by Western nations to the control animals in African countries "environmental imperialism." An Namibian official told the Washington Post, there is a "distorted relationships between people and wildlife, in industrialized countries, where Babaar and Dumbo, are more real than the real thing."

Critics of the ivory ban claimed that while elephant herds in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia were healthy, the end of the ban might encourage poaching in central, western and eastern Africa where elephants population were endangered and vulnerable to poaching. In an attempt to distinguish between ivory from poached elephants and ivory from legally killed animals, scientists tranquilizing elephants and took their DNA "finger prints" so they could tell the difference between culled animals in Zimbabwe and poached ones in Kenya. [National Geographic Earth Almanac, November 1993].

Elephant Poaching in the 2000s

In the 2000s, "Even within well-protected, closely monitored populations, bull elephants and matriarchs are being targeted for their large tusks — skewing sex ratios and leaving leaderless herds of orphans,” said Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save the Elephants, a research organisation based in Samburu. Between 2006 and 2009, more than 30,000 elephants were poached from just one reserve, Selous, in Tanzania.

Kenya recorded its worst year for killing in decades in 2009, with 249 elephants killed, up from 140 in 2008 and just 47 in 2007. Last year the killing continued across the continent, the ivory smuggled out of the country as raw tusks or carved ornaments to be sold on the Far East black market. Ian Craig, the chief executive of the Northern Rangelands Trust, a conservation group working to the north of Mount Kenya, found 23 elephant carcasses in a few weeks, all with their tusks hacked off. “I’d say that we’ve reached perhaps a ten-year high in our area. Demand is up, prices are up; there are a lot of guns and a lot of criminals,” he said. In estimated 257 tons of ivory was taken from poached elephants in 2006. About 23,000 killed elephants are necessary to produce that much ivory, The cost of ivory was around $800 a kilogram that year up from $110 a kilograms in the 1980s. [Source: Tristan McConnell, Times of London, January 8, 2011]

Prices for ivory are so high that fears are growing of a return to the devastation of the 1970s and 1980s. “The rewards are such that you inevitably run into corruption issues,” said Peter Younger, the wildlife crime programme manager at Interpol, who has helped in stings on ivory trafficking gangs. Charlie Mayhew, of Tusk Trust, said: “Prices are so high there are rewards for everyone ... from rangers all the way to politicians....What we are seeing now is more worrying [than the 1980s] because the bans are in place yet poaching is escalating. The gains of the last ten years can be quickly eroded.”

Dr Richard Leakey, a naturalist, added: “We’re right back where we were in the 1980s. I suspect that a lot of the killing in Kenya is carried out by wildlife department personnel or with their full connivance.” Julius Kipngetich denied collusion by his department’s officials saying, “If you look at the seizures it is clear they are not coming from government stocks because those are marked with indelible ink.”

Income from the ivory trade provided money to groups like the Janjaweed, which behind much of the violence and ethnic cleansing in the Darfur area of Sudan. The ivory trade has been linked to African armed groups including the Lord’s Resistance Army, al-Shabab and Darfur’s Janjaweed. Rampant poaching has been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Kenya, Gabon, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

2011 Worst Year in Decades for Endangered Elephants

In December 2011, AP reported: “Large seizures of elephant tusks make this year the worst on record since ivory sales were banned in 1989, with recent estimates suggesting as many as 3,000 elephants were killed by poachers, experts said Thursday. "2011 has truly been a horrible year for elephants," said Tom Milliken, elephant and rhino expert for the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC. "In 23 years of compiling ivory seizure data ... this is the worst year ever for large ivory seizures," said Milliken. [Source: Associated Press, December 29, 2011]

Some of the seized tusks came from old stockpiles, the elephants having been killed years ago. But the International Fund for Animal Welfare said recent estimates suggest more than 3,000 elephants have been killed for their ivory in the past year alone. "Reports from Central Africa are particularly alarming and suggest that if current levels of poaching are sustained, some countries, such as Chad, could potentially lose their elephant populations in the very near future," said Jason Bell, director of the elephant program for the fund based in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts He said poaching also had reached "alarming levels" in Congo, northern Kenya, southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique.

Milliken thinks criminals may have the upper hand in the war to save rare and endangered animals. "As most large-scale ivory seizures fail to result in any arrests, I fear the criminals are winning," he said. TRAFFIC said it is clear there's been a "dramatic increase" this year in the number of large-scale seizures -- those over 1,760 lbs. in weight. There were at least 13 large seizures this year, compared to six in 2010 with a total weight just under 2,200 lbs. In Tanzania's Selous Game Reserve alone, some 50 elephants a month are being killed and their tusks hacked off, according to the Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency.

With shipments so large, criminals have taken to shipping them by sea instead of by air, falsifying documents with the help of corrupt officials, monitors said. In another sign of corruption, Milliken said some of the seized ivory has been identified as coming from government-owned stockpiles -- made up of both confiscated tusks and those from dead elephants.

Asia Fuels Record Killing of Elephants in Africa

In December 2011, AP reported: Most cases of ivory smuggling “involve ivory being smuggled from Africa into Asia. TRAFFIC said Asian crime syndicates are increasingly involved in poaching and the illegal ivory trade across Africa, a trend that coincides with growing Asian investment on the continent. "The escalation in ivory trade and elephant and rhino killing is being driven by the Asian syndicates that are now firmly enmeshed within African societies," Milliken said in a telephone interview from his base in Zimbabwe. "There are more Asians than ever before in the history of the continent, and this is one of the repercussions." [Source: Associated Press, December 29, 2011]

In July 2012, AFP reported: “China, Vietnam and Thailand are among the worst offenders in fuelling a global black market that is seeing record numbers of elephants killed in Africa, environment group WWF said. Releasing a report rating countries' efforts at stopping the trade in endangered species, WWF said elephant poaching was at crisis levels in central Africa. In parts of Asia, elephants' ivory has for centuries been regarded as a precious decoration.[Source: AFP, July 23, 2012]

Global efforts to stem the trade have been under way for years, but China, Thailand and Vietnam are allowing black markets in various endangered species to flourish by failing to adequately police key areas, according to WWF. The WWF it accused China and Thailand of being among the worst culprits in allowing the illegal trade of elephant tusks. "Tens of thousands of African elephants are being killed by poachers each year for their tusks, and China and Thailand are top destinations for illegal African ivory," WWF said.

WWF urged China to improve its enforcement procedures and warn Chinese nationals they would face severe penalties if they were caught illegally importing ivory from Africa. China has also made genuine efforts overall to stop the illegal trade of endangered species' parts, but elephants' ivory remained a big problem because of the huge demand in the world's most populous country, it said.

In Thailand, WWF said the main problem was a unique law that allowed the legal trade in ivory from domesticated elephants. In reality, this was a "legal loophole" that allowed indistinguishable illegal African ivory to be sold openly in upscale boutiques, it said.

DNA Analysis of Elephant Ivory Reveals Trafficking Networks

As few as three major criminal groups are responsible for smuggling the vast majority of elephant ivory tusks out of Africa, according to a new study. Christina Larson wrote in Associated Press: “Researchers used analysis of DNA from seized elephant tusks and evidence such as phone records, license plates, financial records and shipping documents to map trafficking operations across the continent and better understand who was behind the crimes. The study was published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior.““When you have the genetic analysis and other data, you can finally begin to understand the illicit supply chain — that’s absolutely key to countering these networks,” said Louise Shelley, who researches illegal trade at George Mason University and was not involved in the research.[Source: Christina Larson, Associated Press, February 15, 2022]

Conservation biologist Samuel Wasser, a study co-author, hopes the findings will help law enforcement officials target the leaders of these networks instead of low-level poachers who are easily replaced by criminal organizations. “If you can stop the trade where the ivory is being consolidated and exported out of the country, those are really the key players," said Wasser, who co-directs the Center for Environmental Forensic Science at the University of Washington.

For the past two decades, Wasser has fixated on a few key questions: “Where is most of the ivory being poached, who is moving it, and how many people are they?” He works with wildlife authorities in Kenya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and elsewhere, who contact him after they intercept ivory shipments. He flies to the countries to take small samples of tusks to analyze the DNA. He has now amassed samples from the tusks of more than 4,300 elephants trafficked out of Africa between 1995 and today. “That’s an amazing, remarkable data set,” said Princeton University biologist Robert Pringle, who was not involved in the study. With such data, “it becomes possible to spot connections and make strong inferences,” he said.

“In 2004, Wasser demonstrated that DNA from elephant tusks and dung could be used to pinpoint their home location to within a few hundred miles. In 2018, he recognized that finding identical DNA in tusks from two different ivory seizures meant they were harvested from the same animal — and likely trafficked by the same poaching network.

“The new research expands that approach to identify DNA belonging to elephant parents and offspring, as well as siblings — and led to the discovery that only a very few criminal groups are behind most of the ivory trafficking in Africa. Because female elephants remain in the same family group their whole life, and most males don’t travel too far from their family herd, the researchers hypothesize that tusks from close family members are likely to have been poached at the same time, or by the same operators. Such genetic links can provide a blueprint for wildlife authorities seeking other evidence — cell phone records, license plates, shipping documents and financial statements — to link different ivory shipments.

“Previously when an ivory shipment was intercepted, the one seizure wouldn’t allow authorities to identify the organization behind the crime, said Special Agent John Brown III of the Office of Homeland Security Investigations, who has worked on environmental crimes for 25 years. But the scientists’ work identifying DNA links can “alert us to the connections between individual seizures,” said Brown, who is also a co-author. “This collaborative effort has definitely been the backbone of multiple multinational investigations that are still ongoing,” he said.

“They identified several poaching hotspots, including regions of Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana, Gabon and Republic of Congo. Tusks are often moved to warehouses in another location to be combined with other contraband in shipping containers, then moved to ports. Current trafficking hubs exist in Kampala, Uganda; Mombasa, Kenya; and Lome, Togo.Two suspects were recently arrested as a result of one such investigation, said Wasser.

“Traffickers that smuggle ivory also often move other contraband, the researchers found. A quarter of large seizures of pangolin scales — a heavily-poached anteater-like animal — are co-mingled with ivory, for instance. “Confronting these networks is a great example of how genetics can be used for conservation purposes,” said Brian Arnold, a Princeton University evolutionary biologist who was not involved in the research.

Combating Ivory Poaching

Clarence Fernandez of Reuters wrote: “To try and curb the trade, Thailand began implanting microchips in domesticated elephants five years ago in a project that has so far installed the devices in 70 percent of the country’s 2,350 domesticated elephants. “Microchips help us to differentiate wild from domesticated elephants,” said Prasop Tipprasert, a specialist at the National Elephant Institute that runs the project jointly with the Department of Livestock Development and Mahidol University. “When we run across an elephant with no chip, our first suspicion is the animal was taken from the wild. This is an effort to deter wild elephant poaching,” he told Reuters. [Source: Clarence Fernandez, Reuters, March 3, 2006]

Former Chinese NBA basketball player Yao Ming has become an activist and conservationist intent on weaning the Chinese off their fondness for rhino horn, elephant ivory and shark fin soup. He has visited Kenya to raise awareness about the rhino horn and ivory issues and made a film there called “End of the Wild.”

Peter Knights, director of WildAid, an organization that uses Chinese celebrities, like Ming and Jackie Chan, to encourage Chinese not to buy ivory, told Vanity Fair, “It’s a combination of new money and old ideas, a huge bubble we’re trying to burst. The younger generation gets it. It’s the aging new wealthy, who have tremendous purchasing power and see acquiring ivory as part of holding on to their historic Chinese-ness, who have to be reached — before there’s no more ivory left to buy.” Knights told Vanity Fair the Chinese government has been very supportive. CCTV, the state-owned television station, and a whole range of other outlets have donated media time and aired everything from 15- to 30-second public-service announcements to five-minute shorts to half-hour documentaries.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; National Geographic, Live Science, Natural History magazine, David Attenborough books, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Top Secret Animal Attack Files website and various books and other publications.

Last updated December 2024