Earlier this week, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reported that on May 6 a group of 17 heavily armed poachers, who presented themselves as part of the transitional Séléka government but were of Sudanese origin, entered the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park.

They then headed to Dzanga Bai, a large clearing where between 50 and 200 elephants gather at any given time during the day and night for the mineral salts. Ecoguards later reported that they saw these poachers fire at elephants from the observation platform used by scientists and tourists.

Located in southwestern CAR, the Dzanga-Sangha reserve (which includes the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park) is part of the Sangha River Tri-National Protected Area (TNS), which includes Nouabalé Ndoki National Park (NNNP) in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) and Lobéké National Park in Cameroon. Dzanga-Sangha is home to rare western lowland gorillas and more than 1,000 forest elephants. (This population is part of several thousand that share habitat with NNNP.)

While most World Heritage sites in elephant range states are seriously affected by poaching, the remoteness of the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, combined with on-the-ground support by WWF and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), have helped protect it from major poaching incidents. Until now.

For the past 30 years WWF, WCS, and the CAR government have collaborated on programs within the Dzanga–Sangha protected areas that both protect wildlife and support livelihoods for hundreds of local people.

For nearly 25 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) also has supported efforts in the park, including funding research on the forest elephants that use Dzanga Bai.

Dozens of Elephants Dead

Following the retreat of poachers on the evening of May 8, ecoguards explored Dzanga Bai the next day and found more than 26 elephant carcasses: 20 adults and four youngsters in the clearing itself and two in the river nearby. All their tusks had been hacked off.

An assessment of additional damage, possibly including other elephant carcasses in the surrounding forest and smaller clearings, is ongoing. It is reported that at least one of the camps in the park has been ransacked.

Elephant slaughter at Dzanga Bai, CAR. Photograph courtesy of WWF.

A Surprise

The violent incursion took conservationists by surprise. Months earlier, groups of poachers originating from Sudan, who were killing elephants in the Ngotto forest (some 60 miles from Dzanga Sangha), had been successfully blocked from advancing toward Dzanga-Sangha by government troops supported by WWF.

WWF staff in the area thought the poachers had left the region and started their trek back to Sudan in order to beat river levels rising in the rains; their donkeys and camels would be unable to cross the swollen rivers.

While lawlessness in the area had increased over the last two months—rebels repeatedly pillaged park headquarters and WWF offices, and there had been some local elephant poaching—nobody was ready for the methodical attack.

Since 2010, poachers had sought the Dzanga Bai elephant clearing, but conservationists had managed to prevent them from reaching it.

“We didn’t expect to find our worst nightmare: the most experienced elephant killers of these parts of Central Africa,” said Bas Huijbregts, who leads the Illegal Wildlife Trade Campaign for WWF in Central Africa.

“With our staff evacuated after the pillaging,” Huijbregts said, “our main priority was maintaining a minimum protection presence to stop local poachers from going on a rampage in the park while continuing to try to mobilize reinforcements from central government troops in Bangui. We were not prepared for this.”

Elephant slaughter at Dzanga Bai. Photograph courtesy of WWF.

Who Are the Poachers?

Who are the poachers? The answer is unclear. The vehicle carrying the group into the park was branded as Séléka. The poachers did not speak the local language or French.

“We understand that these Sudanese poachers came with a mission order from Séléka powers in Bangui,” Huijbregts said.

In March, Séléka, which means “union” in the local Sango language and is an alliance of seven opposition groups, finally ousted former CAR President François Bozizé. Chaos has reigned since then.

There have been many reports of looting, rapes, killings, and other human rights abuses since the takeover. On April 29, the UN Security Council issued a statement expressing strong concern about the worsening humanitarian and security situation and the weakening of CAR institutions.

The Séléka-dominated government is having a very difficult time establishing control over the country. There are many fighters who report to no one, and many splinter groups, who refer to themselves as Séléka but who may or may not be part of the “official” alliance. It seems that each of the seven members of the alliance has its own chief of staff and armed fighters.

One such subsidiary of Séléka is currently stationed in Bayanga, a town near the park, where they’re in charge of protecting Chinese diamond prospectors. Unlike previous groups who sacked  the region, these men are reportedly well-disciplined. They have helped reestablish some rule of law and have had meetings with local authorities and ecoguards.

On Wednesday, this subsidiary delivered a message to the poachers in the park from the Séléka leadership in Bangui asking them to leave the park immediately and report to the Bayanga-based Séléka.

It appears that the poachers obeyed. According to WWF, by the evening of May 8, they had left the park with their truck fully loaded with ivory.

Since the shooting, WWF reports that no elephants have been seen in the area.

What Is Happening Now?

The CAR ministry of environment in Bangui was expected imminently to announce a mission to secure the area in and around the Dzanga-Sangha protected areas. But when that announcement will be made, what such a mission would be, and who would be involved is unclear.

It would likely be made up of agents from the ministry of environment, plus some compilation of other forces. These could include members from one or more of the seven groups that make up Séléka and perhaps some of the official armed forces, who reportedly have little or no weapons or equipment.

As of May 10, most of the park’s 42 ecoguards are back at their posts—watching and waiting.

“We’re at war right now, and it’s foggy,” explains Richard Ruggiero, Chief, Branch of Asia and Africa at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Ruggiero has worked on the ground in Central Africa for over 20 years. “The possibility exists that we can turn this around in the very near future.”

Indeed, it’s not the first time conservationists have faced this situation. In 1997, rebels threatened to wipe out elephant herds in the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), and a group of dedicated conservationists and government rangers successfully prevented it.

“We are considering all options,” Huijbregts said. “We urge the government in Bangui to send the support troops to the area that were promised almost two weeks ago. In the meantime, we continue to support the local rangers, who, against all odds, are still doing their job.”

The Greater Malady

Whatever actions are taken to resolve this crisis, the larger issue is the underlying incentive for the elephant poaching: high demand and high ivory prices.

“What we’re seeing in Dzanga-Sangha is a symptom of a greater malady,” Ruggiero said. “The malady is human selfishness and ignorance that produces the market that causes all of this demand. We’re seeing the symptoms being played out in CAR. The disease is greater and comes from elsewhere.”

“At the end of the day, one of two things will end poaching,” Huijbregts added. “Either there is no more demand, or there are no more elephants. The choice is up to us.”

Baby forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) amidst other elephants in Dzanga Bai, a forest clearing in Dzanga Sangha Protected Area, CAR. Copyright WWF-Canon/Carlos Drews

Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

Elephants may use a variety of subtle movements and gestures to communicate with one another, according to researchers who have studied the big mammals in the wild for decades. To the casual human observer, a curl of the trunk, a step backward, or a fold of the ear may not have meaning. But to an elephant—and scientists like Joyce Poole—these are signals that convey vital information to individual elephants and the overall herd.

Biologist and conservationist Joyce Poole and her husband, Petter Granli, both of whom direct ElephantVoices, a charity they founded to research and advocate for conservation of elephants in various sanctuaries in Africa, have developed an online database decoding hundreds of distinct elephant signals and gestures. The postures and movements underscore the sophistication of elephant communication, they say. Poole and Granli have also deciphered the meaning of acoustic communication in elephants, interpreting the different rumbling, roaring, screaming, trumpeting, and other idiosyncratic sounds that elephants make in concert with postures such as the positioning and flapping of their ears.

Visit their acoustic database here.

Poole has studied elephants in Africa for more than 37 years, but only began developing the online gestures database in the past decade. Some of her research and conservation work has been funded by the National Geographic Society.

“I noticed that when I would take out guests visiting Amboseli [National Park in Kenya] and was narrating the elephants’ behavior, I got to the point where 90 percent of the time, I could predict what the elephant was about to do,” Poole said in an interview. “If they stood a certain way, they were afraid and were about to retreat, or [in another way] they were angry and were about to move toward and threaten another.”

Over the course of thousands of hours of observations, Poole came to understand and essentially translate what elephants were communicating to one another. She was also the first to discover musth in African elephants, a state of heightened sexual and aggressive activity in males, during which they display characteristic behaviors such as the gestures classified in the database as ear-wave, trunk-bounce-drag, head-toss, chin-in, and the distinctive musth-walk, a sort of elephant strut.

As Poole was working in the bush, her husband, who has a communications background, immediately saw the value of raising public awareness of the sophisticated behavior of these charismatic animals and was eager to share what they were learning. “Petter said, ‘Let’s get this out there and make it available for people,’” Poole explained.

Poole and Granli began the process of characterizing the gestures and displays they were seeing in their fieldwork. They created nine overarching categories for their gestures database: attentive, aggressive, ambivalent, defensive, social integration, mother-offspring, sexual, play, and death (since elephants have marked behavior around dead companions).

“Elephants can be drama queens and really expressive, or they can be incredibly subtle and understated. It depends on what’s going on and the dynamics of the group,” Poole said.

Mating Pandemonium

Some of the more dramatic behavior is seen in the sexual category in a display the researchers labeled mating-pandemonium.

“The females rushes forward from having mated and just starts this incredible display where she’s ear-flapping, rumbling, roaring, and making a hell of a racket, and it draws in everybody else—the whole family participates,” Poole said. “Then she’ll go over and sniff his penis and semen. She even picks [semen] up off the ground with her trunk and splashes herself with it, roaring and rumbling. This is the drama queen stuff, though in this case, it serves to attract other, more distant males.”

And then there are the subtler gestures, such as the attentive category’s freezing posture, which elephants use when they detect a possible threat. Elephant rumbles contain very low frequencies, some of which people cannot hear. Elephants can detect the more powerful of these sounds from several miles away, and these same vibrations travel seismically through the ground even farther. Picking up on these signals may cause elephants to freeze as a group and hold completely still, Poole explained.

“Someone might freeze at the back of the group first,” Poole said, “and immediately then everyone else picks up the sounds we can’t hear and the vibrations we don’t feel.” Elephants have been observed responding to sounds like other elephants, vehicles, and stampeding zebras from over a mile away, as well as distant thunder and earthquakes. Reacting appropriately to these sounds is important for their survival.

Sense of Humor

Poole recalls how elephants at play used to charge her car, appearing to trip and fall while tusking the ground (tusk-ground gesture) in front of her vehicle. “I used to think that they really did trip—no longer!” Poole said. “I have seen it enough times to know that pretending to fall over in front of the car is all part of the fun. It is one of the behaviors that led me to say that elephants have a sense of self and a sense of humor. They know that they are funny.”

Following are examples from the nine overarching categories that Joyce Poole and Petter Granli have categorized to decode elephant gestures.

(All images and video are copyrighted by ElephantVoices and included here courtesy of Joyce Poole and Petter Granli.)

Aggressive (Ear-Spreading)

Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

A young elephant in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique threatens Poole’s vehicle, from which she is observing him. He spreads his ears in an exaggerated way to intimidate her. Typically in such an aggressive stance, an elephant will hold its head well above its shoulders and, with tusks lifted, direct its gaze at its adversary. As seen in the standing-tall display, another aggressive gesture described in the database, an elephant may increase its height by standing on a log or an anthill to assume greater stature, a tactic used by males when they’re sizing each other up.

Play (video) (Climb-on, play-rub, tusk-ground, head waggling)
Watch video of elephants at play as Joyce Poole narrates and explains their behavior.

Some of the play gestures in the video include climb-on, play-rub, tusk-ground, and head-waggling.

Mother-Offspring (Caress)

Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

The relationship between a mother elephant and her offspring is a protective, reassuring, and comforting one. Mothers and other family members caress the young in many different ways, by wrapping a trunk over the calf’s back leg, as seen in the photo above from Amboseli National Park in Kenya. Mothers also wrap their trunks around the calf’s belly, over its shoulder, and under its neck, often touching its mouth. A gentle rumbling sound often accompanies the caress gesture.

Attentive (Periscope-Sniff)

Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

Elephants have an incredible sense of smell. The way an elephant holds the tip of its trunk can tell an observer where its attention is directed. When the trunk is lifted up in an s-shape, called the periscope-sniff, the elephant is detecting scents carried on the wind. Such a movement is used if additional information is wanted, such as if the elephant is meeting strangers or perceives danger. Another common type of sniff is the sniff-toward, in which the trunk is held relatively straight and pointed in the direction of interest.

Defensive (Group-Advance)

Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

Elephants advance toward Poole’s vehicle en masse in a coordinated group defensive maneuver. Elephants’ first line of defense is to bunch together in response to a perceived threat while they decide what action to take. In the photo above, an elderly matriarch named Provocadora—of the Mabenzi elephant group in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park—had instigated the group-advance. She then handed off the “dirty work” to the other females, Poole said. Tuskless, another female elephant led the assault with the support of 35 other elephants behind her.

Sexual (Driving)

Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

When a male is in musth (the term for heightened sexual state), such as the one at right in the photo, and is ready to mate, he will approach the estrous female (at left) and begin pushing or driving her with his forehead prior to mounting her. This female is standing her ground to indicate she is ready to mate. She actively pushes back against the male, locking her legs. Mounting occurs once the male places his forelegs on the female’s back.

Death

Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

Elephants are empathetic and will console, feed, assist, or attempt to rouse an injured or fallen elephant. They also have an understanding of death and appear to pay homage to the dead of their own kind. Elephants may use their tusks and trunk to try and feed a dead elephant, or attempt to lift or even carry sick, dying, or dead elephants.

Ambivalent (Touch-Face)

An elephant may touch its face for reassurance, one of several gestures elephant biologist Joyce Poole has observed during her decades in the field.
Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

If an elephant feels uneasy, or is ambivalent about what to do next, he or she may engage in touch-face, a self-directed touching of the face, mouth, ear, trunk, tusk, or temporal gland, apparently to reassure and self-soothe.

Social Integration (Let’s-Go-Stance)

Photo courtesy of ElephantVoices

When a member of a family wants to go in a specific direction, she will adopt a particular type of posture that Poole and Granli have termed the let’s-go-stance. The female elephant initiating the movement will stand on the periphery of the group and lift or swing her foot (foot-swinging gesture) in the direction she wants to travel. She’ll purposefully face the desired direction, as her rumble call tells the other elephants, “I want to go this way. Let’s go together,” which she’ll repeat every minute or so. Her persistent calling attracts the attention of others who may slowly move to join her.

All video material was filmed in the Maasai Mara Reserve where National Geographic’s Northern European Fund is supporting the ElephantVoices project, “Elephant Partners: Conservation through Citizen Science and Web Technology.”

Learn more about this project by listening to Joyce Poole’s lecture at National Geographic Live in 2012.

Visit the ElephantVoices gestures database.
Find out more about elephant partners in the Maasai Mara.

For further reference:
Poole, J. H. and Granli, P. K. 2011. Signals, gestures and behaviors of
African elephants. In Moss, C. J., Croze, H. J. & Lee, P. C. (Eds.),
The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective
on a Long-Lived Mammal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poole, J. H. 2011. The behavioral context of African elephant acoustic communication. In Moss, C. J., Croze, H. J., & Less, P. C. (Eds.), The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Mammal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

On Friday, April 19, I stood in Makadara Court in downtown Nairobi waiting to hear the case of a Vietnamese man arrested in transit at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on April 7 for smuggling 488 pieces of ivory.

When I’d arrived, at 9:00 a.m., for the first of two ivory cases, scheduled for ten o’clock, court room six was already filled to capacity. Throngs of people were lined up outside, so I squeezed through and found a place to stand.

Nicholle Myles was already there, so tall and distinctive with her Oriental-African features. I felt proud for having enlisted her help.

An official with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) had called me days earlier in desperation: Unless an interpreter could be found, the court would have to throw out the case against a Vietnamese ivory smuggler.

Twitter had come to the rescue. My appeal went viral, and a phone number was sent to me. I called, and Nicholle said she could do it. Nicholle Myles may be the only Vietnamese speaker in all of Nairobi!

I Tweeted my gratitude to all who had helped and promised that this criminal would be going to jail.

New Resolve to Stop Ivory Criminals

Everything seemed to have been going our way lately. On February 1, the government’s highest advisory body, the National Social and Economic Council, had come up with clear resolutions to end the crisis facing elephants and rhinos by committing to use “the full force of the law.”

“Elephants and rhinos,” the council acknowledged, “are Kenya’s national treasures and must be protected in their own right and also to secure economic potential of tourism in Vision 2030.

The illegal killing of these and other species,” the council asserted, “should be viewed…as an economic sabotage since this poses a grave threat to Kenya’s indigenous resources wherein the tourism sector is a major contributor to the country’s economy.”

In the same vein, President Uhuru Kenyatta surprised Kenyans at his inauguration by stating: “My fellow Kenyans, poaching and the destruction of our environment has no future in this country. The responsibility to protect our environment belongs not just to the government but to each and every one of us.”

At the opening of parliament on April 16, the president went further: “We are stewards of our environment, holding in trust this Earth for future generations of Kenyans. We have a sacred duty to protect it, our wildlife and our landscape. That is why I will propose legislation to strengthen the protection of the environment.”

Immediately people reacted. On April 2, I sent a letter, co-signed by more than 60 conservationists and tourism operators, to the Chief Justice, asking him to implement actions to elevate the seriousness with which wildlife crimes are handled in Kenyan courts and to review cases where justice had clearly not been served.

These two fresh cases against a Chinese and a Vietnamese ivory trafficker were a perfect test for the nation’s newly articulated resolve—that from now on in Kenya, wildlife really would matter.

The KWS prosecutor, Didi Wamukoya, was sitting in the dock. Beside her was Ondicho Shem Nyakenyanya, the lawyer for the accused Vietnamese, Nguyen Viet Truong Phong.

Mrs. Nyongesa, the magistrate—petite and smartly dressed—arrived late. We all rose as she apologized for the delay and got straight to work.

The First Ivory Case

After wading through a long docket of other offenses—assaults, family problems, business frauds, robberies, and other crimes—Magistrate Nyongesa opened a bright yellow file, the first of the two ivory cases. I couldn’t help but feel excited.

It was now 11 a.m. A name was called, Zhou Jinkui. A police officer opened the door to the holding cells, and a Chinese man appeared as the acrid smell of urine wafted into the already stuffy court room.

Through his interpreter, Zhou pleaded guilty to charges of having ivory bracelets, a string of 13 ivory beads, and an ivory pendant.

Wamukoya asked that the items be taken to the National Museums of Kenya to confirm that they were ivory, unless Zhou didn’t dispute the fact.

Zhou said he didn’t know, and the magistrate instructed that the pieces be sent for testing. She adjourned the case for one week, and Zhou was taken back into one of the stinking holding cells.

I was pleased with how this was going. This magistrate seemed to be on our side.

Next Up

The Vietnamese smuggler, Nguyen Viet Truong Phong, was next. I couldn’t wait to see how long he’d be jailed for.

On April 7, he had arrived in Nairobi from Benin in transit to Bankok on a Kenya Airways (KQ) flight. Airport security personnel had stopped him at gate 12 after his luggage was screened and found to contain suspicious items. The officers opened the baggage and noted that he was carrying 488 worked ivory bangles.

The airport police arrested him and called KWS officers. Sniffer dogs were brought in and confirmed that the pieces were indeed ivory.

To show the court the evidence, a young police officer pulled two hard-backed suitcases—one black, one blood red—from the wall in front of me. He lay them down, unzipped them, and flipped open the lids.

Wamukoya described the haul: “The ivory weighed 33.6 kilograms [74 pounds] and KWS assessed it to be worth 5.7 million Kenyan Shillings [$68,000].”

A gasp erupted from the room as everyone craned their necks to see inside the suitcases. Each suitcase perhaps 20 boxes about a foot long and five inches wide and deep. On their tops were pictures of a red, yellow, and orange vase with blue flowers, with the words “Flower Vase” inscribed in curly script.

The officer pulled out one of the “vases”—red, yellow, and orange painted ivory bangles stacked to form a tubular vase-like object. An ingenious way to conceal illegal ivory.

Nicholle Myles, the interpreter, stood up and walked over to the accused, who was standing in the dock. He had a vacant look—confusion, perhaps?

Handed a piece of paper by the magistrate’s assistant, Myles read out the charges. The man nodded at each, muttering incomprehensibly.

Magistrate Nyongesa asked what he was saying. “He says he bought the ivory but did not sell the items in the Nairobi airport,” Myles replied. “He bought them in a shop in Benin and was taking them to Vietnam.” He hadn’t known that any kind of paper work was required, Myles added.

Like many other ivory smugglers caught in Kenya before him, Truong simply accepted the charges. Since he had no previous convictions, he was treated as a first offender.

KWS asked for a stiff penalty because of the quantity of ivory involved. Truong’s lawyer, Ondicho Nyakenyanya, responded by appealing for leniency on the grounds that the accused was a tourist who was just buying trinkets with spare cash.

“He did not know it was illegal in Kenya,” Nyakenyanya argued, adding that the situation was confusing for travelers because some countries in the region, such as Tanzania and South Africa, allow trade in wildlife objects, even though elephant poaching is an offense in countries across Africa.

“The origin of the trophies are [sic] not known,” Nyakenyanya said. “The elephants might have died of natural causes, perhaps of old age. Some may have been domesticated and died of natural causes.”

Nyakenyanya argued that the Wildlife Act of 1989 does not anticipate or account for the origin of the ivory confiscated in transit.

“The accused was on KQ,” Nyakenyanya said. “KQ has a responsibility for informing their passengers that such trophies could be confiscated. There is no clear information saying you can or cannot carry this.”

By now the accused was beginning to look like the innocent victim of poor policies and lack of information in Africa.

Nyakenyanya also noted that Truong was from a very different country, with a different language, which made it difficult for him to understand that he was carrying illegal ivory.

Things weren’t going well for the prosecution.

Magistrate Nyongesa gave no indication that she recognized the seriousness of the crime and its impact on elephants. She wondered if the ivory had been purchased in Benin rather than Kenya, giving the impression that she thought it a lesser crime if the ivory was bought elsewhere.

Didi Wamukoya noted that neither the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) nor Kenyan law takes into account the origin of the ivory.

Clearly, the CITES regulations, and Kenya’s responsibilities, as a signatory, to comply with them were as alien to this court as the Vietnamese man’s incomprehensible speech.

Magistrate Nyongesa sought extra time to research the law, reconvening the court at 3:00 p.m.

After we’d gathered again in room six, the magistrate wasted no time in convicting Truong, because he’d admitted to the charges. She fined him a total of 40,000 Kenyan Shillings (less than $500).

The ivory he was trafficking was worth more than a hundred times that.

Magistrate Nyongesa’s ruling flew in the face of recent pronouncements at the highest levels of government—the promise to use the full force of the law to stop poaching and illegal dealing in wildlife products.

Disbelief at the Decision

I drove home in a state of shock, devastated.

No matter how many poachers, dealers, and traffickers we arrest, it makes no difference. The courts let them off so lightly.

The outcome of this case feels like a slap in the face—another painful reminder that Kenya has lost credibility as a global leader in conservation. The words of our president are completely at odds with the actions of the courts.

How did we fall down so far? Traditionally, Kenya has been on the front line in combating elephant poaching in Africa and a leading voice for elephant conservation through CITES, the Convention on Biodiversity, the Convention on Migratory species, among others.

We have branded ourselves “Magical Kenya”—the country that has hosted so many documentaries celebrating our wildlife, especially elephants, which are a major tourism attraction. Tourism contributes 12 percent of the nation’s GDP.

Our wildlife enforcement agency, the Kenya Wildlife Service, is recognized as one of the most effective in the world.

The 1989 ivory burning by Kenya, which led to the successful international ivory trade ban, is indisputably the most powerful conservation symbol the world has ever seen.

Yet the killing of elephants has now reached a 20-year high. Ivory smuggling through Kenya has reached an all-time high, and Kenya is now the second-largest African transit country for illegal ivory, after Tanzania.

Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda today account for nearly 70 percent of the illegal ivory flowing out of Africa.

At the CITES conference last month, Kenya and seven other principal nations were identified as complicit in the ivory trade: Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and China.

The ivory crisis we’re facing is unparalleled. We have fewer elephants than ever before. There is unprecedented and rapidly escalating international demand for ivory, and highly sophisticated criminal networks are feeding that appetite.

It’s going to take more than speeches by His Excellency President Uhuru Kenyatta to turn this situation around.

Immediate Measures Needed

I believe that once again Kenya stands at the crossroads of turning things around for elephants. This can be achieved if we rediscover our courage and take some bold steps:

– Recognize that poaching and ivory trafficking are serious crimes and immediately elevate penalties for wildlife crimes.

– Put a specialized team of prosecutors in place to ensure that ivory traffickers and other wildlife criminals are dealt with as aggressively as the law allows.

–Empower a law enforcement task force to address poaching and ivory trafficking. The task force should include the KWS, national and local police, national intelligence and customs officials, and international agencies and organizations such as Interpol.

–Hire more rangers to patrol parks and reserves.

–Routinely use ivory sniffer dogs and scanners in transit areas of airports and seaports.

–Establish a wildlife crime hotline.

–Create an ivory crisis outreach campaign to educate a broad range of stakeholders including African customs officials, transporters, the judiciary, travelers through air and seaports, targeted Asian communities in Kenya, and the public at large.

Unless demand for ivory is confronted, the cost of protecting elephants in Africa will continue to rise.

This is why we call upon President Kenyatta to take the lead in international diplomatic discussions with the premiers of key ivory-demand countries: China, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Photograph courtesy of Paula Kahumbu

Paula Kahumbu is the Executive Director of WildlifeDirect, a conservation organization that is campaigning to save Kenya’s elephants. She is spearheading conservation efforts to achieve law reform in wildlife and environmental matters in Kenya. Kahumbu is also an Emerging Explorer of the National Geographic Society.

On March 14-15, at least 86 elephants were killed in Tikem, near Fianga in the Mayo Kebbi East region of southwestern Chad, close to the Cameroon border. Among the victims were more than 30 pregnant females, many of which aborted their calves when they were shot. The calves were left to die, and reportedly some were shot. It’s too sickening to even comprehend.

Elephant calf aborted after its mother was shot in March 14-15 poaching incident. Photo courtesy of SOS Elephants of Chad.

The massacre occurred in the closing hours of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) 16^th Conference of Parties (COP16) meeting (held in Bangkok from March 3-14), where the topic of elephants was high on the agenda.

The timing was also just weeks after the discovery of 28 elephant carcasses, all stripped of their ivory tusks, in Cameroon’s Nki and Lobeke National Parks and at least 15 carcasses across four separate locations in Central African Republic.

All these incidents followed numerous reports of columns of Sudanese poachers crossing Central African Republic and heading toward Cameroon and Chad.

Both the Chad and Cameroon governments had responded to this advance notice. In December, the Chad government sent soldiers and military aircraft to patrol the region and Cameroon deployed its Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), a special forces military unit. But neither was able to find the poaching gangs and stop them.

“We’ve been aware of the poachers’ presence and movements since last November in the Central African Republic, but given the means at hand, and difficulty of working in this vast, remote landscape, it has been very challenging to fully address the situation,” says Richard Ruggiero, Chief, Branch of Asia and Africa at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Emergency Acknowledged

A three-day emergency meeting on the poaching of elephants, organized by the Economic Community of Central African States (CEEAC), was held in Yaoundé, Cameroon from March 21-23. The 70-plus participants included ministers of defense, foreign affairs, and wildlife protection, as well as representatives from the United Nations Development Program and other organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund and SOS Elephants.

Some attendees suggested that because key people such as the forces on the ground were not immediately involved, the assessment and resulting plans were not suitable for the real needs.

Inside the CEEAC emergency meeting. Photo courtesy of SOS Elephants of Chad.

The final declaration acknowledged that national initiatives to combat poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking had failed. It also reiterated the need for countries involved throughout the ivory supply chain (origin, transit, and destination) to coordinate efforts to combat the transnational, organized crime networks that are operating in the region.

Delegates adopted a plan of extreme urgency to fight poaching (PEXULAB), which includes immediate anti-poaching measures in the northern zone of Cameroon, the north and southwest of the Central African Republic, and southern Chad.

The plan calls for: mobilization of military forces in Chad and Cameroon to support anti-poaching brigades; creation of national coordination units and a mechanism for inter-state coordination; exchange of information on poachers’ movements; implementation of a tripartite agreement that would allow intervention by mixed (multi-country) brigades; and criminalization of poaching and illegal ivory trade so that penalties mirror those for organized transnational crimes.

Around the world, penalties are notoriously low for wildlife crimes. On March 19 in Ireland, for instance, two rhino horn dealers were fined 500 Euros ($650) each for illegally smuggling eight rhino horns, valued at an estimated 500,000 Euros ($650,000) on the black market.

Delegates at the emergency meeting also called on ivory consuming nations to adopt measures to reduce demand and restrict illegal entry of ivory. While they welcomed Thailand’s recent announcement to ban its illegal ivory trade, they pressed that country to actually implement the ban. They also urged other destination countries to redouble their efforts to combat the illicit trade.

The CEEAC meeting plan echoes the themes of CITES COP16, namely: the need to work across source, transit, and range states; the need for coordinated, transnational efforts; the need to treat illegal killing of elephants and other wildlife and illicit trade in ivory and other wildlife parts as serious crimes; and the need for more effective enforcement by way of prosecutions, higher penalties, and advanced operational techniques already used to combat illicit trade in narcotics.

“We’re up against formidable opponents here, so it’s not going to be easy.”

“We’re dealing with an extremely difficult situation,” CITES Secretary-General John Scanlon says. “We’ve got rebel militia groups, on very rare occasions rogue elements of the military, and organized criminals all involved in the illegal killing of elephants and illegal ivory trade,” “We’re up against formidable opponents here, so it’s not going to be easy. That’s why COP16′s focus on political engagement and on enhancing operational effectiveness is so important.”

 Just Another Toothless Meeting?

Financing for implementation of the CEEAC emergency plan, as well as for medium- and longer-term actions, is still needed. While a 1.8 million Euro ($2.3 million) budget and timetable for actions were laid out for PEXULAB, the status of financial commitments is unclear. PEXULAB documents specified the need to set up a supra-national task force to maintain “the momentum between Governments and partners for the financing of operations.” The meeting’s final declaration invited the international community and other partners to come forward with money.

To further complicate matters, lingering political instability in the Central African Republic came to a head on Sunday when rebels seized the capital and President Francois Bozizé fled the country (seeking temporary refuge in Cameroon). This chaotic situation implies that poachers can continue to roam that country with impunity.

To Ofir Drori, coordinator of the Central and West Africa Wildlife Law Enforcement Network (which has assisted in the jailing of more than 800 traffickers), the meeting missed the point. “All the talks and discussions just distract us from what it’s all about,” he said. “Corruption is the number one obstacle of wildlife law enforcement. Until we are ready to fight it, we lose the war against the poachers.”

Poachers Poised for More Attacks

Based on sightings from the air and ground, it appears that the Sudanese poachers have broken into small bands of 10 to 15 men and are widely dispersed. However, the specific movements and exact locations of the poachers in and around Chad and Cameroon are unconfirmed, and the accuracy of reports is unclear. Some reports place a gang or gangs of poachers in or near Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park, which was the site of the slaughter of hundreds of elephants in early 2012.

“We’re watching developments closely and are working with our partners in southern Chad, including African Parks Network and others,” Ruggiero says. “The Chadian authorities on the ground are engaged, and we have assurances that our Cameroonian partners are fully informed and will react appropriately.”

Already, Chadian troops are pursuing the poachers and have engaged them. On Monday, President of SOS Elephants Stephanie Vergniault said that “the Chadian Président has deployed a lot of troops to catch the poachers and is very determined to get them before they leave the Chadian territory.” She noted that earlier in the day there had been a violent exchange of gunfire between some poachers and the regular army in Loumobogo (close to the Central African Republic). She also reported that authorities seized 30 tusks and that “Chad has declared a total war to the poachers.”

Chadian anti-poaching troops. Photo taken in December 2012 or January 2013. Photo courtesy of SOS Elephants of Chad.

Lack of financing and need for high-level commitment and coordination for wildlife crime law enforcement were top issues at the CITES COP 16 meeting. But those concerns voiced by the delegates did nothing to help the pregnant elephants massacred days ago in southwestern Chad.

They, and tens of thousands of other elephants, are the victims of a perfect storm of high ivory prices driven by soaring Chinese demand, low risk of ivory traffickers getting caught, low penalties for those who do, and a lack of priority at either local levels or higher political ones to get serious about elephant poaching.

Encouragingly, Chad appears to be actively pursuing the poachers. But the situation in Cameroon and the Central African Republic is less clear, and the bottom line is that the Sudanese poachers are still hunting.

Elephants near the SOS Elephants camp. Photo courtesy of SOS Elephants of Chad.

Hi! I am Celia Ho, a 14-year-old girl from Hong Kong. I have been working on an ivory ban campaign to help save elephants from the inhumane ivory market.

Elephants have always been a symbol of happiness for me since I watched a scene of elephants playing light-heartedly in a documentary when I was very small, and I love every part of them, their intelligent eyes, lovely noses… They have emotion, feelings and close relationship with one another just like humans! But I have never thought of the exacerbating difficulties they have been encountering in recent decades until an inspirational article by Mr. Bryan Christy.

Celia Ho. Photo courtesy of Celia Ho.

An Inspiration, “Ivory Worship,” by Bryan Christy

Mr. Christy’s “Ivory Worship” from the October edition of National Geographic was the inspiration of my campaign. When I opened the plastic bag and got the magazine out, excitedly as usual, the bloody cover picture of a ranger hacking off a dead elephant’s tusk immediately caught my eyes and drove me to find out what was happening. Then, the detailed facts and data showed me everything. Some people buy ivory for religious purposes, some for status recognition. The hunger of the inhumane trade is unlimited, and myriads of elephants are slaughtered every year.

I would like to show my thankfulness to Bryan, who has kindled the fire inside me to speak out loud for elephants. Being a student, I actually did not know what I could do except write a letter to the newspaper, which was South China Morning Post, and that was the turning point of my life.

My Partner, Mr. Christian Pilard

My letter about the ivory ban was noticed by Mr. Christian Pilard, the founder of Eco-Sys Action. A few days later, he replied to my letter with supportive and encouraging words. So we were in contact and started our partnership in this campaign. Christian, who has given me a lot of useful advice and freedom  to make decisions on my own, is always a perfect partner to work with.

Another Inspiration, Dr. Jane Goodall

Dr. Jane Goodall, who has always been my idol, had a trip to Hong Kong last year! She is my role model because of her devotion to save chimpanzees throughout her whole life. In her talk, she talked about her story from scratch, the moments she spent with chimpanzees, the importance of a coexistence of humans, wildlife, and the environment. Everything she mentioned and experienced encouraged me to take a deep breath, take out my ivory ban poster, and ask for her support. I will never forget the moment when she smiled at me, autographed my poster, and asked for my email address, giving me a new nickname, The Elephant Girl. Thank you Jane for being the first supporter of my campaign!

My Ivory Ban Campaign

My campaign has gained support from 60 organizations and 26 schools so far. They are a huge encouragement for me to keep on fighting for elephants because so many of us are always on the elephants’ side.

Not surprisingly, only a few of those supporters are from Asia/China—conservation ideas or organizations in Asia are not as ubiquitous as in other continents. Let me quote an example from a survey in China by the International Fund for Animal Welfare: “Seventy percent thought tusks can fall out and be collected by traders and grow back, that getting ivory did not mean the elephant is killed, and more than 80 percent would reject ivory products and not buy any more if they knew elephants were being killed, so it’s ignorance.”

Celia holds an educational poster illustrating the issues facing elephants. The poster can be downloaded from her website. Photo courtesy of Christian Pilard, Eco-Sys Action.

Thus, educating people, especially young ones in Asia and spreading the ivory ban idea are very crucial to the ivory ban’s success. To make these goals a reality, I have been, and will be, taking part in some conservation events in Hong Kong, which is one of the main transit places. Some of the events are:

• The Eighth Annual ESF Environmental Conference. Thank you Ms. Jenny Quinton from Ark Eden for giving me a chance to join the Eighth Annual ESF Environmental Conference, which aimed at encouraging students to start conservation campaigns and develop a sense of caring about the environment and wildlife. It was my honor to share my team’s ivory ban campaign with other students and introduce to them the aggravating circumstances and the imminent extinction elephants are facing. We also won the “Most International Award.”
• Sending a letter to the General Secretary of CITES, John Scanlon, on behalf of children supporting the ivory ban.
• Walking the Green Tiger at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• On April 22, there will be a conservation film show about stopping a huge dam project on the Yangtze River at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Thank you, Mr. George C.K. Jor from CUHK, for letting me display my campaign and information about the ivory ban at that event, which many students and people in the conservation field will attend.

Attracting international attention

Yao Ming has been very active and is always a keen supporter of the elephants. I think getting him involved would send a message to (young) people in China that they can help by, for example, being united against ivory and telling their parents and friends not to buy ivory. If there is far less demand, then there will be far fewer less elephants killed. I believe that his support can gain more awareness worldwide about the rampant ivory trade because he is a celebrity who strongly supports the ivory ban. He is one of my idols too!

We need your help!

My main targets are schools in China.  The slogan of my campaign is, “School United for Elephants,” because this is the place where awareness can be raised and where a chain reaction can happen. For example, if one school in Hong Kong can liaise with one school in China, and that school in China can liaise with another one, etc., then it becomes very powerful.

If you are enthusiastic about the ivory ban, you have the power to save elephants:

• Tell people around you not to buy ivory. You may find helpful the pdf file, the ivory ban poster, and other educational materials on the Resources part of my website: http://ecosysaction.org/celia’s-corner/resources.html Please spread the idea as much as you can, like writing a letter to a newspaper, talking about it on Facebook, filming a video.
• Download the poster from my website and take a photo with you holding it. Please send the photo to me afterwards.
• Introduce the ivory ban issue and my campaign to Chinese or Asian schools near you so I can contact them and spread the ivory ban idea. Educating the younger generation is very important as they will determine the future and the fate of the Earth.

 No poaching! No ivory trade!

“If we are the most intellectual creature that has ever walked on the planet, how come we are destroying that planet?” says Dr. Jane Goodall.

Every tusk costs a life at least! Is it worthwhile?  Ivory is not a necessity for people, but elephants are very crucial animals to the whole world, especially the ecosystem. No poaching! No ivory trade!

My website: http://ecosysaction.org/celia’s-corner/

My Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Elephant-Girl-Celia-Ho/207892889353942?ref=hl

The video is a composite of tours given during the papacy of Popes John Paul and Benedict XVI.  At minute 1:15 we see what appears to be an ivory crucifix on the desk of Pope Benedict and at 1:53 we see two large elephant tusks on the back wall of a conference room.

At the same time elephants were being killed in Chad last week, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) was wrapping up a global meeting in Bangkok, Thailand. Perhaps the most moving speech of the CITES conference was delivered by Sean Willmore, President of the International Ranger Federation, who spoke of the thousands of rangers who’ve lost their lives protecting wildlife and of the families many have left behind. It was a speech that brought representatives from around the world to the edge of tears.

Spiritual leaders have begun to recognize the cost in human lives and morals of the ivory trade.  The Society of Conservation Biology is leading such an initiative.  Others are, too.  During the CITES meeting, the World Wildlife Fund convened a number of prominent Thai Buddhist monks who called for an end to ivory’s use by their followers.

Last month I did an interview on the ivory trade with Vatican Radio. That show has yet to air. It’s impact will be insignificant, however, next to the possibility for elephants and for those who protect them of a Pope who asks himself the simple question: What would St. Francis do?

In a letter to National Geographic posted on this blog after letters from readers of Ivory Worship poured into the Holy See, Vatican spokesperson Father Federico Lombardi wrote, “I have never heard or even read a word that would encourage the use of ivory for devotional objects.”  But when it comes to religion it is the witnessed as well as the read, the believed as well as the heard, that makes all the difference for life.

What message will the new Pope send to the spiritually minded around the world?

In his letter to National Geographic Father Lombardi also wrote: “I believe that the most important and most urgent action is that of raising the awareness of the Christian communities in the countries affected by the most serious phenomena so that they might act together with those in charge and with the other members of the civil communities in which they live in order to deal decisively with these very serious problems. This must be done, if possible, in collaboration between the followers of different Christian confessions or other religions.

“In fact,” he added, “it is a serious problem that Christians can and should unite against….”

Little Fellow was a good-looking young bull with splayed tusks and ear lobes that curled out. We estimated that he was about 16 years old, just reaching puberty.

But Little Fellow would not live long enough to pass his genes on to the next generation.

Over a period of six weeks he had been treated several times by the Kenya Wildlife Service veterinarian for a spear wound. The beep-beep-beep of a metal detector indicated that part of the spearhead was still lodged in his left front leg.

His injured leg was twice the size it should be. One look at it was enough to know that he wouldn’t pull through, despite the vet’s heroic efforts and the vigils of those, both elephant and human, who came to comfort him.

Pus oozed from the gaping wound. Septicemia had set in, and the infection was coursing through his body.

Exhausted, Little Fellow rested his head in the fork of a tree to take some weight off his body, especially his right front leg. (ElephantVoices/Petter Granli)

His infected leg was swollen to gigantic proportions. (ElephantVoices/Petter Granli)

Little Fellow could no longer walk. With tremendous effort, he could muster a sort of hop, dragging his enormous leg with him. He rested often, his trunk draped over a fork in a tree, seeking momentary relief from the suffering.

He knew he couldn’t lie down again—he’d learned that when he was immobilized for treatment and was unable to get back up without assistance from ropes attached to a vehicle.

Despite exhaustion and agony, Little Fellow was fighting for his life with dignity and purpose, staying near water, good pasture, and shade—within yards of the safety of the Conservancy Manager’s house.

He wasn’t the first male we knew who had come to die here. Lekuta, a mature elephant twice speared for his tusks and treated many times for the wounds, had also died close to Manager’s house. His bones lay scattered nearby, and elephant dung strewn among them was testimony that he had not been forgotten.

On Monday, February 25, Little Fellow died. Like Lekuta, he will not be forgotten by the people or the elephants who have cared about him.

The Urgency is Real

Born in the late 1990s, Little Fellow entered a world that was pretty safe for elephants. But today, 24 years on, it certainly isn’t. The ongoing slaughter is threatening the survival of the species, as well as tourism, economies, and stability in many African countries.

Little Fellow knew nothing about CITES CoP16, the meeting currently taking place in Bangkok, Thailand. He knew nothing of the many documents, arguments, and words that CITES attendees and experts have spent on elephants.

CITES is the organization whose mandate is to ensure that species are not endangered by international trade. It is the only instrument the world has to set boundaries on the exploitation of species and to decide upon global action when one is under siege.

The CITES delegations know nothing about Little Fellow. But they do know about the shocking number of at least 25,000 elephants killed last year for their tusks.

Based on what we know and what we hear, the actual number may be as high as 50,000. That’s ten percent of all the remaining elephants in Africa—a terrible and terrifying reduction in a single year.

We believe that the controversial CITES-approved one-off sales of ivory to China and Japan have contributed to the current mass killings of elephants by stimulating a huge increase in the demand for ivory.

We can only hope that Little Fellow didn’t die in vain. We can only hope that this time CITES and its member states will put elephants above trade and profit and stem the ongoing massacre.

We’re not in Bangkok. But from Kenya we’re following closely how CITES confronts the current crisis. Thailand’s Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, set the right tone when opening CoP16 on Sunday, March 3, by promising to ban Thailand’s internal ivory trade. We hope she has inspired other state leaders as well. If similar action is followed in China, the lives of tens of thousands of elephants could be spared.

We wish all the delegations a successful conference, and we urge that sound science, not politics and horse-trading, be allowed to prevail.

First, the cupcakes I gave out with “Vote 4 Bryan” on them were from a bakery, and not made from scratch like Sue’s.

Second, I fumbled a question from a classmate who wanted to know what I was going to do about the trash blowing out of the dump on Cedarville Road. It was my first environmental question.

I said I would build a fence and hire more people to pick up the trash. The questioner rejoined, “What if the trash blows over the fence?” I said I would build a taller fence. Sue added that she would not only build a taller fence, she would string a gigantic net over the whole dump so that no trash ever got out. If the holes in the net were too big, she would make it a roof, like the astrodome.

Lessons of a Third Grader

Sunday is opening day for the two-week-long 16th meeting, in Bangkok, Thailand, of the world’s leading body for regulating the world’s wildlife—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES). I’ll be there.

Everything I needed to know about international wildlife trade I learned in that grade school election. First, all conservation is local. Whether cupcakes or condors, real change happens when it comes from within the group. It can’t be store bought or packaged.

In the early 1990s the U.S. launched one of the world’s most intensive undercover investigations against Malaysia-based international wildlife trafficker Anson Wong. Operation Chameleon was a success, and Wong went to prison in the U.S. for almost six years.

But he didn’t stop trading wildlife, and when he got out, he was well on his way to becoming bigger than ever, until the Malaysian people read about his exploits in National Geographic.

Outraged, they wrote letters to their newspapers, which covered the story on their front pages. Parliament passed new wildlife laws, and the government announced administrative reform.  Anson Wong was stripped of his business licenses and went to prison in Malaysia.

The second lesson for both children and the wildlife trade is that when it comes to winning a vote, no proposed solution is too ridiculous.

Take elephants. In 1989, after a decade in which an African elephant died every ten minutes for ten years, CITES member countries agreed to an international ban on the ivory trade. Almost immediately, key elephant populations began to recover.

But a number of southern African countries opposed the ban, and in 1997 they won the right to sell 55 tons of ivory in a one-time “experimental” sale to Japan, on condition that CITES would monitor ivory trafficking and elephant poaching to see if these crimes increased after the sale.

It doesn’t take a tobacco lobbyist to tell you that proving one bad thing caused another bad thing is next to impossible. From the start, this was a system built to favor the ivory trader. And the ivory trafficker.

Just Say No to Ivory

Here is where it’s useful to jump from my grade school memories to a metaphor my team used while investigating the story that became Blood Ivory: Ivory Worship. Cocaine.

Every time one of us wanted to say the word elephant or ivory, we substituted the word cocaine. When we did this, we found that the emotion and melodrama that attaches so easily to animals and often intrudes on good clean criminal investigation disappeared. (Drugs are also on the mind of the CITES Secretary General who earlier this month said that wildlife crime fighters need to start approaching criminals as if they were narcotics traffickers.)

Applying our approach, let’s assume the United Kingdom has a cocaine problem. The CITES solution would be to authorize Colombia to make a one-time sale of 55 tons of cocaine to England and see what happens. Does crime go up, down, stay the same?

The answer from CITES was all three. As described in Blood Ivory, CITES hired an affiliate of the World Wildlife Fund, called TRAFFIC, to study the impact of the 1999 ivory sale on smuggling.

With a degree of bureaucratic self-importance that would be comical if so many elephants wouldn’t soon die, TRAFFIC examined whether individual votes in CITES over the years could be connected to changes in ivory seized around the world. They couldn’t be, of course. By framing the question in unprovable and irrelevant terms, TRAFFIC established a presumption in CITES thinking that continues to this day: that there is no correlation between individual CITES decisions and ivory trafficking.

The main question for illegal traders and their corrupt government confederates is whether countries are actually going to sell ivory, and when. In that regard, TRAFFIC concluded in its first Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS) report, released in 2002, that ivory smuggling had gone up after the Japan sale and that the culprit was China.

But in 2007 TRAFFIC, employing further statistical analysis, changed its conclusion to say the illegal ivory trade had gone down for the next five years after the Japan sale. And so CITES parties authorized a second ivory sale in 2008 of more than a hundred tons of ivory to Japan and China.

Now, taking the U.S. to be the China of cocaine consuming nations, imagine you are an American drug trafficker. CITES has just sold 100 tons of cocaine to the U.K. and the U.S. Your cocaine is of course indistinguishable from that sold by government-approved shops now opening in major American cities. The government’s selling price is higher than yours. Do you stop cocaine trafficking? Or do you tell all your friends and your children to join you, anticipating an ever expanding future?

The CITES solution to the ivory trafficking problem was a dumb one. The idea that anyone could accurately measure the impact of the Japan experiment on so little data was equally flawed.

TRAFFIC’s latest ETIS report, released for the upcoming CITES meeting, acknowledges that it may have been wrong yet again about ivory smuggling after the Japan sale: Instead of going down for the period 1997 to 2007, “the salient pattern is really one showing relative stability,” TRAFFIC asserts now. Oops.

Further, in this year’s report TRAFFIC confesses what it should have made clear on day one—that it is impossible to prove statistically that a one-off sale causes ivory crime: “To do so competently would required a detailed understanding of all factors which drive illegal trade in ivory along the entire trade chain.” This type of modeling exercise “is a major undertaking and much of the data that would be required is currently not available.”

In other words, ETIS isn’t able to do what CITES parties hired it to do.

China’s ivory appetite is only just beginning to grow.

ETIS is an extremely valuable tool. It is not a silver bullet. The glaring error in ivory trade policymaking is not with ivory seizure statistics, or the confusion between correlation and causation, or even the silliness of expecting there to be a crystal ball for crime in the first place. It is in the absurdity of thinking that any sale to Japan in 1999 could anticipate the impact of a sale to China in 2008. It is in the refusal to acknowledge the real impact of China.

China shares borders with 14 countries, has ten times Japan’s population, is investing in Africa, and has an economy on a rise so steep it may eclipse the U.S. by 2030.

To supplement a documentary film aired this week about the ivory trade, Battle for the Elephants, producers hired a Hong Kong-based market research firm to take a look at ivory consumption patterns in China. The survey of several hundred middle class people in nine cities revealed that 80 percent of respondents own ivory (averaging 2.7 pieces), and 84 percent intend to acquire more.

Poaching and ivory trafficking have skyrocketed in the post-China ivory sale years. The Chinese government recently built the world’s largest ivory carving factory and is funding the training of a new generation of ivory carvers.

But here is where the CITES absurdity exceeds that of my misguided fellow third-graders. In testimony before Senator John Kerry last spring, CITES Secretary General John Scanlon told Kerry that it was an open question whether ivory sales increase crime. There are some, he said, who don’t see a correlation. Stuck in the fable of the Japan experiment, he’s ignoring the fact that including China in the ivory trade has been a game changer.

More sales are now on the horizon. The CITES Secretariat has hired Rowan Martin of Zimbabwe to design a centralized organization for the systematic selling of ivory. Martin was the Robert Mugabe lackey (what else can one in the Mugabe government be called?) who opposed the ivory ban for Zimbabwe in 1989, threatening to take all of southern Africa with him.

Martin is now in the employ of the CITES Secretariat, the group of policymakers who rely on the WWF/TRAFFIC ivory reports and say that the question is open whether ivory trading with China leads to ivory crime.

So just as was the case for me in third grade, reality comes down to a vote.

For our series finale, Aidan meets with Khamis Kagasheki, minister of natural resources in Tanzania, which stores the world’s largest stockpile of elephant tusks in the world — 90 metric tons. Kagasheki agrees to allow us to take the first-ever footage of the vast warehouse that stores thousands of tusks, valued at $50 million.

Unlike Kenya, Tanzania, one of the poorest countries in the world, has not agreed to burn its stockpile, arguing that the money from a sale could support conservation efforts. An official told us that if an international agency were to buy the tusks with the intention of burning them, they would eagerly sell them. But who would support such an idea?

Many in Tanzania would like to sell the ivory inside the warehouse – it would bring millions of dollars to a desperately poor nation. Others worry that another sale would just drive demand for ivory higher, and that would lead to more poaching. One thing is clear, perhaps the final battle for the elephants is being fought right now.

WATCH THE FULL ONLINE SERIES:

• Battle for the Elephants: Web Series Intro
• Episode 1: The Plight of the Elephant
• Episode 2: Criminal Traders Exposed
• Episode 3: The China Ivory Market
• Episode 4: Massive Ivory Stockpile

Watch “Battle for the Elephants” on PBS

Aidan Hartley is given rare access to a massive ivory stockpile in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania / J.J. Kelley for National Geographic Television

What’s the impact of that high demand? As we put together the treatment for the film, which airs in the U.S. Wednesday, February 27^th on PBS, we were stunned to find that no one had ever performed a comprehensive market analysis of the ivory trade in China. Why was ivory so popular there? Who was buying it, how much were they buying, and for what reasons?

Along with the director of our film, John Heminway, and our producers, Katie Carpenter, and JJ Kelley, we began thinking about ivory as a commodity, like any other luxury product. We weren’t being callous, just practical. If we could figure out the contours of the demand for ivory, maybe we could use that knowledge to help reduce the demand.

So in a bid to stop the killing, we started thinking like entrepreneurs intent on making a killing in the ivory trade. Who would our customers be? Why would they buy our product? What types of ivory products would appeal to buyers? What impediments to market would there be for our product? What help or hindrance might we expect from the government?

With these basic questions in hand, we sought out a market analysis firm based in China to do the work. We hired Ifop Asia, a company with offices in Shanghai and Hong Kong that has a long track record of market surveys focused on luxury goods.

Assessing the Market

Over several weeks, Ifop, in consultation with our team, devised a survey. To increase the likelihood of accurate responses, respondents answered a variety of questions about luxury goods, including gold and jade. They weren’t told that the objective was to analyze the market in ivory goods.

The survey polled consumers in nine of China’s largest cities. The sample group of 600 targeted members of the Chinese middle and upper middle class, as defined by those with an annual income of RMB 200,000 (U.S. $32,000) and above. The average respondent’s mean income was RMB 520,917 (U.S. $84,000). Ages ranged from 18-55, with a mean age of 35. Gender break down was 49 percent male, and 51 percent female.

The findings helped round out the research in our film and provided a lot more data about the trade that we couldn’t include. Reading the key findings is a sobering experience.

According to the survey, 84 percent of Chinese middle and upper-middle class consumers surveyed plan to buy ivory goods in the future. That represents a very large number and a very grim future for elephants.

The study found that video and billboard advertisements in China that show how poaching is threatening Africa’s elephant population largely fail to deter consumers.

(More than 50 percent of respondents have seen this type of messaging in videos or billboards.)

What Might Deter More Buying?

Nearly 60 percent of respondents believe that making ivory “illegal to purchase under any circumstances” or “the strong recommendation of a government leader” would be the most effective way to stop ivory trading.

Extensive research and reporting by investigative journalist Bryan Christy, who is featured in our film and who wrote the National Geographic October cover story, Blood Ivory: Ivory Worship, revealed that Chinese desire for ivory is at least partly rooted in the country’s cultural and spiritual heritage.

That seems to be supported by other findings. For example, ivory ownership is high: Eight out of ten households surveyed owned at least one ivory product, with 2.7 pieces on average per household. While some ivory products were received as a gift, the incidence of purchasing ivory is high as well: 68 percent of respondents have purchased at least one ivory product in the past.

The survey was revealing about the appeal of ivory. Around one-half describe an ivory product as a “rarity,” 35 percent call it a “luxury,” and 29 percent think it confers “status.” Fourteen percent associate ivory with “wisdom,” while 87 percent associate purchasing ivory products with a feeling of  “prestige.”

Currently in China, some ivory can be legally traded, apparently adding to confusion in the market as to what is or is not legal. So, for example, less than one-fifth of respondents associate owning such an item with animal cruelty, and only one-tenth feel uncomfortable about its possession.

That could be because some ivory for sale comes from the long extinct mammoth, while other ivory is from stockpiles sold legally to China in a 2008 auction that was allowed by CITES, the international trade convention charged with managing the 1989 international trade ban.

Still, a study by the International Fund for Animal Welfare found that an estimated four-fifths of ivory items sold in China are believed to have been made of smuggled tusks.

A Glimmer of Hope

For the optimists among us, the survey has a small bright spot: 16 percent of respondents say they will not buy ivory.

Our hope is that by providing these data to the wider world, we might grow that 16 percent. Collaborating with the Chinese—people and government—to stem the tide is the only way forward.

And lest we think our hands in the West are clean, the U.S. and Western Europe are still important ivory demand countries. As our film makes clear, in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, U.S. demand for ivory, mostly for piano keyboards, brushes, combs, and pool balls dropped African elephant populations by the millions.

The difference in 2013 is that today there simply aren’t that many African elephants left.

The China survey is based on respondents’ answers, but if it’s fair to extrapolate, and if 84 percent of the Chinese middle and upper-middle classes plan to buy even the smallest of trinkets, that’s more than two million items.

Unless demand is dramatically reduced, that may spell the end of the wild elephant.