Myanmar And The Elephant Project Made History By Signing Agreement For Elephant's Care

The Myanmar government and The Elephant Project signed a new historical agreement that aimed to relocate elephants into a safer place, avoiding human conflicts. It was the first time the country made a settlement for the care of this animal after the government-owned elephants were turned into an attraction and forced to perform in parks, following the ban of raw timber export in 2014.

"We have to take action now," Dane Waters, The Elephant Project founder, and president, said, per the South China Morning Post. The worsening case of deforestation in Myanmar destroys Elephants' habitat, so they are left wandering in villages in search of food. However, their search often leads to human-elephant conflicts that put both parties in danger.

Under the new agreement, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation and The Elephant Project's forest department will look for elephants that need to be moved. They also have to find a place where they can be safely relocated.

The Elephant Project will begin relocating 10 to 15 elephants to designated safe zones. However, the organization has bigger plans to build a sanctuary that will be home to Myanmar's many captive elephants. About 5,520 gentle giants live in captivity, which are almost two folds of the 3,000 estimated elephants that live in the wild.

"Our sanctuary plan is different to any that has ever been built before," Waters said. If it happens, it will be the biggest sanctuary ever constructed and may hold up to 3,000 elephants.

There will be different investment opportunities to fund the sanctuary project. It includes ethical elephant experiences and eco-friendly stays near the shelter. Waters assured that these things would be built with the elephants' welfare in mind. "Investment is going into protecting elephants," he said.

Freelance documentary photographer Ko Myo revealed elephants' story in Myanmar is a sad one. According to The Irrawaddy, he saw how people treated these animals when wild elephants passed by a town in Kyaukpadaung, Mandalay Region.

About six elephants from the Bago mountain range wandered into Kyaukpadaung Township. When villagers saw them, they came together and used tame elephants to force them to change their director. They went back to their habitat in the mountains, where elephant poaching usually happened.

If wild elephants continuously lost their habitat, there will be more conflict with humans and illegal trading. Hence, their species may disappear in Myanmar.

Ko Ye Min Thwin, Senior Communications Officer at WWF Myanmar, said Ko Myo's photos could help people to know more about elephants. "They are lovely and worth protecting; that we should value them and they don't deserve to be killed," he added. The photographer, on the other hand, disclosed that the only solution to solve this problem is to raise awareness and urge people to stop using products made of animals' part.

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Excessive Poaching May Be Causing African Elephants To Evolve Without Tusks

While elephants born without tusks are not unheard of, they normally comprise just 2 to 6 percent of the herd population. However, that is not the case at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, where an astounding 33 percent of female elephants born after the country’s civil war ended in 1992, are tuskless. While that may appear to be just a coincidence, Joyce Poole, an elephant behavior expert and National Geographic Explorer, has another theory. The researcher thinks we may be witnessing an unnaturally induced evolution of the species due to the incessant poaching of the mammals for their valuable tusks.

Tusks are overgrown upper incisors which protrude from sockets in the elephant’s skull. Unlike our permanent teeth, they continue to grow throughout the animal’s life, becoming longer and thicker with age. While humans covet them for ornamental purposes, the teeth are an essential survival tool for elephants. The mammals use tusks for a variety of tasks including, extracting tree bark, digging for water or roots and, in the case of males, even fighting with one another. While poachers usually first target older males due to their impressive tusks, females are not spared either. As a result, in areas where poaching goes unchecked for extensive periods of time, the proportion of tuskless females increases. This allows them to gain a biological advantage, resulting in a larger than average population of female offspring with no tusks.

Poole, who also serves as scientific director of nonprofit ElephantVoices, believes this phenomenon explains the unprecedented rise in the number of tuskless females at Gorongosa National Park. The researcher, who has been studying the wildlife sanctuary’s elephant population for many years, says prior to the country’s 15-year-long civil war, the 100,000 acre-park was home to over 4,000 pachyderms. However, by the time the conflict ended in 1992, about 90 percent of the mammals had been slaughtered for ivory to help finance weapons and meat to feed the soldiers. Of the less than 200 survivors, over 50 percent of the females – 25 years or older – had no tusks. Hence, it is not surprising that the park’s tuskless elephant population has grown substantially.

This is not the first time researchers have observed a drastic change in the population of elephant herds who have suffered severe poaching losses. At the Ruaha National Park in Tanzania, an area which was heavily poached in the 1970s and 1980s, 35% of elephants 25 years or older and 13% of those younger than 25 are now without tusks. A 2008 study published in the African Journal of Ecology found that the number of tuskless females at Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park and adjacent Lupande Game Management Area went from 10.5 percent in 1969 to almost 40 percent in 1989, largely due to illegal hunting for ivory.

Thus far, the genetic consequence of poaching has largely impacted female elephants. Poole explains, “Because males require tusks for fighting, tusklessness has been selected against in males, and very few males are tuskless. For African elephants, tuskless males have a much harder time breeding and do not pass on their genes as often as tusked males.”

However, if the slaughtering of males with the most impressive tusks continues at this pace, it could result in a generation of elephants with much smaller tusks. Poole says, “Assuming that poachers select according to tusk size, they will tend to kill older males with very large tusks, thereby taking out of the population of breeding-aged males who also happen to have very big tusks. Those males then no longer pass on their genes for large tusks. In this manner, heavy poaching will select out genes for large tusks.”

The recent ban on ivory in both the US and China should help eliminate, or at least reduce, elephant poaching. However, scientists are not sure how long it will take for the herds with a higher rate of tuskless females, to reverse the trend.

The only silver lining is that the tuskless elephants look healthy, indicating they have learned to adapt without their all-important “tools.” To investigate how the pachyderms are able to thrive without tusks, a team led by University of Idaho researcher Ryan Long recently fitted six adult females, three with tusks and three without, with GPS tracking devices. The researchers plan to monitor the animals for a few years to document the tuskless mammals’ modified lifestyle and assess its impact on the surrounding environment.

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Understanding Local Impacts to Inform Wildlife Conservation

It’s 16:30 in rural Myanmar and my field crew, who had spent the day surveying for elephant dung, are racing our caravan of motorbikes back to the field camp before dusk descends. As the day fades tempering the oppressive heat, elephants emerge from the shade of the forest to begin foraging, sometimes in the sugarcane and rice paddies that are increasingly spreading across the country. Running into one of these giants as they too use the network of dirt roads to travel through the landscape can be fatal, necessitating a strict policy of returning to camp before dark for the safety of the team. While my field season lasts a short three months, this is one of many concessions residents are forced to make or risk their lives encountering an elephant as night falls.

It is unsurprising that most of the remaining endangered charismatic mega fauna are in some of the poorest areas on earth. It is in these areas where wildlands still exist, and the lack of economic development has prevented the boom of industry and infrastructure that could spell the end for remaining mega herbivores and carnivores. It is also in these areas where the people tasked with the burden of living with the species disproportionately bear the brunt of human-wildlife conflict. Though local community members indicate they value elephants for religious and cultural reasons, as well as the important role they play in the ecosystem, increasing human-elephant conflict may lead to a greater acceptance of elephant poaching as a way to prevent crop-raiding and reduce human injury and death from run-ins with their giant neighbors.

I began using satellite-GPS collars to monitor elephant movements in 2015 with the hope of using this data to inform conservation policy and develop ways to mitigate human-elephant conflict. Instead, these collars turned into beacons that allowed us to locate the carcasses of the elephants after they had been killed by poachers. Further groundwork revealed an astounding rate of elephant poaching occurring throughout Myanmar. And what’s more, poachers aren’t just killing elephants for their ivory- elephant skin, genitals, and other parts are increasingly being sought after for export into neighboring countries such as China.

To Chinese markets

Grey, dry, and wrinkled. Cut into palm-sized pieces, hard as a rock, yet lighter than expected. You would be forgiven to mistake it for any of the countless kinds of roots and herbs also laying on the table – if it weren’t for the thick black hairs sprouting out. This is what elephant skin looks like in a Chinese market. A few inconspicuous chunks nestled among dried seahorses, pangolin scales, muntjac antlers, and gibbon skulls. Typically, elephant skin is turned into a powder by mixing with talcum and applied externally to treat muscle soreness, ulcers, and open wounds. Of course, this is all very illegal. Elephant poaching and trafficking are prohibited and China’s recent decision to shut down its ivory trade was a milestone for the conservation community. But old habits are pervasive, and traditions die hard.

Traditional Chinese medicine has an extremely long history dating back thousands of years and its practitioners number among the millions, many of whom are old, live in the rural countryside and have relied on these sorts of medicines all their life. Never heard of aspirin, but a regular shot of snake wine to improve constitution is common knowledge. Chinese demand for exotic animal ingredients is a primary driver of illegal poaching, not just in China, but in other countries including bordering Myanmar. Exacerbated by the rise of the Chinese middle class, this demand has created a biodiversity crisis in Southeast Asia and is a direct threat to many protected and endangered species around the world. Fortunately, growing domestic environmental concerns and calls to protect natural resources have resulted in greater focus on these issues in recent years with China’s new wildlife protection law taking effect in 2017.

One popular form of traditional Chinese medicine involves steeping plant and animal material in high-proof alcohol for days to years. Steeping is thought to extract the medicinal properties into the liquor and often endangered animal parts are used including bear gall bladders and tiger bone. These ingredients can be degraded or removed prior to sale, which makes monitoring difficult. In collaboration with the Wildlife Forensics Center of the Yunnan Endangered Species Commission and the South China DNA Barcoding Institute at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, I am currently working to develop a genetic method to identify which animals are being used directly from the liquor itself.

Conservation is local first

Cultural attitudes, long-standing traditions, and the economic realities of life in rural developing nations contribute to the realities of human-wildlife conflict and the illegal wildlife trade. Conservation is inherently a multi-faceted, human issue that involves many kinds of stakeholders. Conservation policy doesn’t work when foreign scientists simply come in and tell the locals what they can and cannot do. In order to reduce conflict and achieve coexistence, scientists need to engage with local communities and include their input in wildlife management strategies. Scientists can gather the data needed to answer specific questions and develop methods to solve specific problems, but we need buy in from local communities to implement effective mitigation and anti-poaching programs. Successful conservation programs require sensitivity to local cultures and working with communities to fully understand the challenges they face when saving a species: whether it’s the danger wildlife pose while they are alive or the value they hold when they are dead. As conservation scientists, we need to be open to addressing the needs of people to ultimately protect the wildlife under our care.

Dr. Christie Sampson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Clemson University, working in collaboration with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute to address issues of human-wildlife coexistence and poaching. More information about her work in Myanmar can be seen at: arcg.is/0HjnLS. You can follow her on twitter at @WildEcology.

Charles C.Y. Xu is a Ph.D. student in the Redpath Museum & Department of Biology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is interested in using genetics to discover, study, and protect biodiversity. For more information visit his website or follow him on twitter at @CharlesCongXu or on instagram at @DRYBAR.

Science Network Voices gives Equation readers access to the depth of expertise and broad perspective on current issues that our Science Network members bring to UCS. The views expressed in Science Network posts are those of the author alone.

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Elephants are evolving without their tusks due to poaching

African elephants are evolving by not growing tusks as they feel threatened by poachers.

Poachers shoot elephants for their ivory tusks, which are believed to have healing powers. Elephants are adapting to avoid danger, reports Business Insider. Those without tusks have a biological advantage as poachers do not target them.

According to National Geographic, tusks are essentially overgrown teeth that elephants use for most of their daily tasks, like digging for water or vital minerals in the ground and toppling trees to get fibrous food.

Almost a third of the female elephant population in Mozambique do not have tusks. Earlier, this number was between 2% and 4%.

Related: Islamabad zoo’s ‘isolated’ elephant may be released if found suffering from mental health problems

Apart from Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, the tusk-less trend was seen in South Africa’s Addo Elephant National Park as well.

Ryan Long, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Idaho and a National Geographic Explorer, said, “The prevalence of tusklessness in Addo is truly remarkable and underscores the fact that high levels of poaching pressure can do more than just remove individuals from a population.”

In China, ivory is sometimes even more valuable than gold because it is considered a cure for numerous diseases. It is believed that it can increase strength and fertility. Ivory is still in demand in the country despite a ban being imposed in 2017.

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ELEPHANTS ARE EVOLVING WITHOUT TUSKS TO SURVIVE POACHERS

Many of the elephants wandering Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park these days are tuskless.

From 1977 until 1992, the country underwent a brutal civil war. Due to the conflict, about ninety percent of the elephants that once existed there were poached for their ivory, which helped fund weapons and feed soldiers.

Gorongosa’s tuskless elephants developed a biological advantage as a result of the poaching. According to recent figures, one-third of the generation of females born after the war ended never grew tusks – something that would normally only occur in 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants.

Elephant behavior expert Joyce Poole, who studies the park’s pachyderms, says that decades ago, some 4,000 elephants lived in Gorongosa. Following the civil war, those numbers tragically dwindled into the triple digits. Yet-unpublished research compiled by Poole shows that 51 percent of the 200 known adult females (aged 25 or older) that survived the war are tuskless. Of the female elephants born since the war, 32 percent have no tusks.

Poole, who serves as scientific director of a nonprofit called Elephant Voices, explains that male elephants have bigger and heavier tusks than females of the same age. She continues: “But once there’s been heavy poaching pressure on a population, then the poachers start to focus on the older females as well.” The resulting older age population of elephants will, therefore, consist of a high proportion of tuskless females.

Elephant poaching remains a huge problem throughout parts of Africa – it’s estimated that on average, an African elephant is killed every 15 minutes. It’s no surprise, then, that similar shifts among female survivors and their daughters have occurred in countries other than Mozambique that also have a history of substantial ivory poaching. The effect has been particularly extreme in South Africa – in the early 2000’s, 98 percent of the 174 females in Addo Elephant National Park were reported to be tuskless.

In some heavily-hunted areas, such as southern Kenya, poaching has led to reduced tusk sizes. According to a 2015 study by Duke University and the Kenya Wildlife Service, male survivors of a period of intense poaching had tusks about a fifth smaller than average, while females had tusks about one-third the normal size. This pattern continued – offspring born after 1995 had tusks between 21 and 27 percent smaller than elephants in the 1960’s.

Elephants without tusks are surviving and appear to be healthy, according to Poole, but the work they do with their tusks is part-and-parcel to their everyday lives and vital to the well-being of many smaller species, who rely on elephants to dig holes for water and topple trees over for shelter.

While measures are being taken to reduce the global demand for ivory, such as ivory bans in the U.S. and China, it’s unclear how long it will take for elephants with high levels of tusklessness to recover. One thing remains clear: when it comes to saving these beautiful, gentle giants from extinction, time is of the essence.

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China Changes Laws Regarding Trade Of Tiger, Rhino, And Elephant Parts

China has changed the rules regarding the trade of tiger and rhino parts as of 29 October. That means that rhino horns and tiger bones, which are used in Chinese medicine, will be allowed to be used on a limited basis.

This represents a significant change from their total ban on the trade of such parts that had been in effect since 1993.

The new legislation means that parts of animals that have been raised in farms in China can be traded to accredited doctors at certain hospitals.

Western medical experts say that both tiger bone and rhino horns have no medicinal benefits whatsoever, but they are still often ground into powders to be used in Chinese medicine.

As well as those parts, the controversial practice also uses the genitalia of deer, bulls, as well as parts from snakes and elephant tusks.

Many of the parts come from endangered animals, much to the dismay of conservationists and environmentalists.

There are less than 32,000 rhinos left - a statistic that covers all existing species - and around 3,900 tigers remain in the wild.

Nearly 7,000 tigers are raised in farms in China, however. It is not known how many rhinos are held in captivity in the country.

Margaret Kinnaird, from the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement: "Not only could this lead to the risk of legal trade providing cover to illegal trade, this policy will also stimulate demand that had otherwise declined since the ban was put in place."

In another statement, Tanya Sanerib from the Centre for Biological Diversity, added: "China's rhino and tiger decision is a huge step backwards for these animals, which are already on the brink of extinction.

"In the midst of poaching crises, China should be working to stem demand, not condoning rhino horn and tiger bones in unproven medical treatments."

It is not known why the Chinese government has decided to change the rules on animal parts. However, it is thought that encouraging the massively lucrative Chinese medicine industry - thought to be worth more than $100 billion (£78.3bn) - could have played a role in the government's thinking.

Chinese state media claimed that the move would actually benefit animals by improving the monitoring of the trade.

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Educating Hong Kong youth key to stopping ivory trade, elephant charity says

A Hong Kong-based charity says educating the city’s youth could be key to reducing demand for ivory from endangered African elephants.

Even though Kenya is more than 8,000km away, conservation group The Elephant Foundation (TEF) is gearing up for a tour of Hong Kong schools.

“Seventy per cent of people we talk to don’t understand that an elephant has to die for people to get its ivory,” TEF’s co-founder Colin Dawson says. “The minute people understand the elephant has to die, they don’t want anything to do with it.”
TEF has found that children are particularly good at conveying this message, Dawson claims, describing young people as “a conduit for enthusiasm about keeping these animals alive”.

The charity is preparing for its annual Hong Kong Elephant Week, which this year entails a tour of 14 local schools to promote awareness about the cost of the ivory trade to Africa’s wildlife.

TEF will be joined by Daniel Ole Sambu, a Maasai tribesman who works with the Big Life Foundation, which helps to coordinate cross-border anti-poaching operations in East Africa. James Mwenda, a rhino carer at Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a non-profit based in Kenya, will also take part.

Drawing on their compelling personal experiences, Ole Sambu and Mwenda spark a sense of responsibility for the endangered animals when they speak.
Dawson, 48, says Hong Kong’s relationship with the animals is especially important given the city’s traditional role as a global hub for the hunted commodity.
“The ivory trade is still alive and well in Hong Kong,” Dawson laments. “Traders have been given leeway that’s allowed them to continue trading.”

Unlike in mainland China, where the sale of ivory is banned outright, Hong Kong is implementing its ban in phases. The Protection of Endangered Species of Animals and Plants (Amendment) Ordinance was introduced in May this year by the government’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department. But according to the three-step plan, the commercial possession of all ivory will not be made illegal until December 31, 2021.

TEF’s campaign comes hot on the heels of a report by conservation researchers that found this delay is leading directly to an acceleration in the poaching of African elephants. The paper was published in August by the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, and found that seizures of ivory by Hong Kong authorities had risen dramatically since the mainland ban was introduced. It suggested poachers were exploiting the delay as a business opportunity.
Luke Gibson, associate professor of conservation science at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen and one of the report’s authors, believes that tackling elephant poaching requires addressing both supply and demand.

“Demand reductions are very important for elephant conservation,” he says. “But reductions in demand alone cannot solve the problem.”
Gibson advocates a dual-pronged approach: protecting elephants in their habitat while reducing the appetite for ivory in markets in Asia.

TEF is keen to note it stays active on the first point, stressing it has raised more than HK$4 million (US$510,000) for conservation projects and charities including The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an orphan elephant rescue programme, and the Big Life Foundation.
“The bottom line is that up to 40,000 elephants are killed every year across Africa,” Gibson says. “Much of that trade is moving through Hong Kong, considered to be the global epicentre of wildlife trade.”

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China’s push to export traditional medicine may doom the magical pangolin

In a rescue center, the pangolin slowly wakes and uncurls, sniffing out a nighttime feast of ants’ eggs, then lapping it up with its implausibly long tongue. One of 74 pangolins rescued from the back of a truck in Vietnam in April, its survival has defied the odds.

This almost mystical creature, looking like a cross between an anteater and an armadillo but unrelated to either, is the world’s most trafficked mammal: A million of them are thought to have been poached from the wild in just a decade.

Already almost wiped out in China, the pangolin is fast disappearing from the jungles of the rest of Asia and, increasingly, from Africa to supply China’s booming market in traditional medicine.

Now, as China pushes to export traditional medicine around the world under the umbrella of its Belt and Road investment plan, many wildlife experts fear that the animal faces extinction — unless something changes very soon.

“Traditional Chinese medicine should be a healing force for good, but not at the expense of animal cruelty or the extinction of species,” said Iris Ho, wildlife program manager at Humane Society International.

China’s decision to ban the ivory trade at the end of last year gave hope to those battling elephant poaching, “but the real litmus test lies within China’s action — or lack of action — in pangolin conservation,” Ho said.

The air of mystery attaching to the reclusive pangolin has been its downfall, sparking an unjustified belief that its scales have magical medicinal properties. In hospitals and pharmacies across China and Vietnam, powder made from pangolin scales is prescribed for an impossibly wide range of ailments, including rheumatism, wound infections, skin disorders, coronary heart disease and even cancer.

Mothers take powdered pangolin scales to help them lactate, while men drink pangolin blood or consume fetuses in the belief that this will make them more virile.

A woman shops on a Hong Kong street popular for dried foods used in traditional Chinese medicine and dishes including deep-fried scales of endangered pangolins. (Dale de La Rey/AFP/Getty Images)
The use of pangolins in Chinese medicine dates back thousands of years. A 16th-century document recommends eating their scales to reduce swelling, invigorate blood circulation and promote lactation. A 1938 article in Nature suggests they were used to treat malaria, deafness, “hysterical crying” in children and women possessed by “devils and ogres.”

In fact, the scales are made of keratin, a fibrous protein that is the main ingredient of hair, feathers, claws and hoofs throughout the animal kingdom; patients might as well chew their own fingernails.

Pangolins are also served at the dinner table, despite a ban on pangolin meat in China imposed during the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic amid fears that exotic meats could spread disease.

Many fear extinction of pangolins as China pushes traditional medicines
The pangolin is the world’s most trafficked mammal: A million of them are thought to have been poached from the wild in just a decade. (Paul Hilton for WildAid)

In late 2016, all eight species of pangolin were listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), making all international trade in them illegal. But that does not obligate China or Vietnam to curb domestic trade — except to the extent that such trade now relies mostly on sources abroad.

Customs officials make regular seizures at China’s ports, but the very size of those captures makes depressing reading: In the southern city of Shenzhen, 13 tons of scales were seized in November alone, representing tens of thousands of slaughtered pangolins.

Nocturnal and solitary, the pangolin has an effective defense against most predators — even lions can’t work out what to do when the animal rolls up into an armored ball. Its English name comes from the Malay word “pengguling,” which means rolling ball; its Chinese name, chuanshanjia, refers to its supposed ability to “bore through mountains,” a reference to the powerful claws that dig into anthills and termite mounds before that sticky tongue gets to work.

Pangolin mothers carry their young on their backs for the first three months and curl up around the babies if attacked until the young ones’ scales are sufficiently hard.

But the sensitive pangolin adapts poorly to captivity, almost always dying in a few months or years because of stress, disease or digestive problems without reproducing. Secretive pangolin “farms” in China are basically fronts for trafficking operations, experts say.

Conservation groups are trying to reduce demand by educating people about the dangers facing the pangolin and better ways to treat human disease than by consuming animal keratin.

A veterinarian with Save Vietnam’s Wildlife holds an injured pangolin. The false belief that pangolin scales and other parts have magical medicinal properties has fueled a trade that threatens the creature’s survival. (Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP/Getty Images)
The China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, a nonprofit group, has publicly exposed people selling or consuming pangolin meat, including a Chinese businessman who boasted online of enjoying “pangolin blood fried rice” on a trip to Vietnam. After a backlash on social media, he was sacked.

WildAid, whose use of Chinese celebrities to curb demand for ivory and shark fin soup has achieved considerable success, is trying the same approach for pangolins, enlisting the actors Jackie Chan and Angelababy in China and former Miss Universe Pham Huong in Vietnam to front publicity campaigns. It is also trying to persuade traditional-medicine practitioners to use alternative treatments.

Peter Knights, WildAid’s founder, argues that traditional Chinese medicine needs to stop using endangered wildlife products if it wants to become more accepted globally.

“If you want to expand it, you’ve got to clean it up,” he says, citing as precedents the removal of tiger bone and rhinoceros horn from China’s list of approved medicinal ingredients.

But surveys by the Aita Foundation and Humane Society International and by the U.S. Agency for International Development Wildlife Asia project suggest that the message is not yet getting through to the small but significant percentage of Chinese who still consume pangolin products.

Changing minds will not be easy as long as China’s government promotes the “medicinal” use of pangolin scales. Authorities claim to have a stockpile from which they supply hospitals and pharmacies with 26 tons of scales every year but offer no transparency about that process, effectively legitimizing the entire smuggling trade.

China also sparked controversy at a recent CITES meeting by arguing that it should have the right to purchase stockpiles of scales from other countries that were amassed before the Appendix I listing, an interpretation of the convention’s rules not shared by the United States or many other nations.

Meanwhile, on Vietnam’s border with China, powerful criminal gangs control the trafficking of people, drugs and wildlife products, bribing officials to turn a blind eye.

Scott Roberton of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Vietnam says it is hard to convince Asian governments of the importance of saving pangolins, as compared to elephants, rhinos and tigers. He hopes to gain traction by stressing how pangolin trafficking is caught up with other forms of transnational crime and by highlighting the public-health risks of the trade.

But the odds are steep. China’s traditional-medicine authorities have unveiled an ambitious plan to expand along the Belt and Road trade routes, with 57 international cooperation projects due to get underway this year.

And reports of Chinese companies’ trying to open pangolin “farms” in Africa, and of scales being prescribed by Chinese doctors in places as far-flung as South Africa and the United States, have intensified conservationists’ fears.

Nguyen Van Thai, who founded Save Vietnam’s Wildlife and runs the rescue center in Cuc Phuong National Park, says there is still no good strategy for curbing demand for scales or convincing the Chinese government that its support for the pangolin trade could damage its global reputation.

“China wants to show its power,” he said. “The more pressure you put on them, the more they resist.”

Liu Yang in Beijing contributed to this report.

Campaign to end bear farming achieves breakthrough in Vietnam, hits China roadblock

Ivory sales in China finally end this month. But elephants aren’t yet safe.

Tiger farms stoke Chinese demand for tiger wine and rugs, putting wildcats in peril

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Outdoors: Elephants need a certain heavy protection

One of the most unpopular practices going on in today’s outdoors is elephant-poaching. That is, illegally killing elephants for the ivory in their tusks.

Nothing disgusts an observer more than a picture of multiple dead elephants killed for this purpose, or a shot of a baby standing mournfully before its mother’s carcass.

As reported here many times, the world is responding to this tragedy in many ways.

New laws in China restrict tusk trade as well as Canada, and, of course, the United States whose confiscatory practices are almost overly zealous.

Other examples of global activity include Britain,which will introduce one of the world’s strictest ivory sales bans. The new law, announced April 3, includes only narrow exceptions, and violators will face as many as five years in jail or an unlimited fine. Conservationists hope the move will prompt the European Union to pass a regionwide ban at a time when some 30,000 African elephants are being killed by poachers each year.

Meanwhile, Tanzania, since our last report, has taken further steps to protect its dwindling elephant population. The East African nation has been hit hard by elephant poaching, losing 90 percent of elephants (from 110,000 to 15,200) in its Selous Game Reserve during the past 40 years. Now the government has launched a project to monitor 60 elephants in the reserve (roughly, the size of Switzerland) with GPS collars across 12 months.

The aim is to gather data that will help protect and grow elephant numbers.

Even Central Africa’s Chad’s elephant population has dramatically rebounded. During a civil war (2005-2010), poachers took advantage of lawlessness to slaughter 90 percent of the elephants in Zakouma National Park.

Beginning in 2011, a team of conservationists turned Zakouma into a haven for elephants. Today, the park’s herd of more than 500 pachyderms is one of the largest in Central Africa.

That’s the good news. But, like any other serious issue, there’s another side. It needs to be understood, or at least appreciated. To advance a title for this problem, call it “Elephants — best extant or extinct.”

Elephants fall into two broad species: the large African bush variety and the smaller Asian species. The African seems to be under the most pressure today for whatever reason. Through the ages, the African has been used by travelers and warriors; the Asian for commercial drudgery.

This mighty beast is a marvel of nature, not just for its size, but the utility of its probiscus (trunk). It ranges from the strength to lift heavy objects like trees, to detail work with the little nipple at its end. Hannibal’s warriors taught it to remove barbed arrowheads and, modernly, it can extract errant fish hooks. So, its preservation should be a given. Is it though?

Where does the elephant fit? Not in circuses or zoos certainly, so say the animal rights proponents, with some justification. Their planned salvation to date has been on preserves, but to what purpose is that, but only to keep them alive. Modern machinery has rendered them obsolete commercially.

Left to the wild, they remain vulnerable to a poacher who reasons a pair of tusks brings him more income in one night than otherwise working a year in Tanzania — particularly, when his crops and village have been destroyed by a rogue, or, just a browsing herd.

Do we, then, allow the elephant to depart the planet, along with the white rhino that faces similar circumstances owing to the quest for its horn? Before one cringes at this solution, remember that the elephant and rhino’s earliest species similarities — the wooly mammoth and triceratops — preceded them to oblivion.

A solution for this? One way to handle this problem is to give threatened species inalienable rights.

In Slovakia, they’ve passed new legislation that defines all animals as living creatures, not things. The law, an amendment to a veterinary care bill, includes mandatory “chipping” of dogs as well as measures against illegal dog breeders and animal abuse. This is considered a historic step towards improving the status of animals. Or an extreme case of the tail wagging the dog.

Slovakia is just half of what was Czechoslovakia. My brother, who lives in the other part — the Czech Republic (Prague) — has not mentioned a like law there.

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Illegal ivory found on sale in 10 European countries

Illegal ivory has been found on sale in 10 European countries, contravening international efforts to cut down on the trade which campaigners say encourages the poaching of elephants.

The campaigning group Avaaz bought 109 items of ivory and had them tested using radiocarbon dating. Nearly one-fifth of the objects were found to contain ivory from animals killed since 1990, which is illegal, after restrictions on the global ivory trade were put in place in 1989.

Three-quarters of the items were dated to after 1947. The sale of ivory made after that date is subject to restrictions, and to be sold legally requires official documentation.

Avaaz said the findings, which echo other research that has found illegal ivory objects on sale in the UK and elsewhere,showed that Europe should do more to investigate and control the ivory trade.



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President Khama accuses the US government of encouraging elephant poaching

Botswana’s President Ian Khama on Friday accused the US government of encouraging elephant poaching following its recent decision to reverse a ban on …


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Ivory bill boosts fight against elephant poaching

One of the toughest bans on ivory sales in the world is a step closer to coming into force in the UK as the government has introduced the Ivory Bill.

The introduction of this Bill means that measures set out last month by Environment Secretary Michael Gove are a step closer to becoming law, and helping to protect elephants for future generations.

The Bill covers ivory items of all ages, not only those produced after a certain date, subject to some narrow, carefully-defined exemptions. The maximum penalty for breaching the ban will be an unlimited fine or up to five years in jail.

The Bill follows widespread engagement with environmental groups and the antiques trade sector as well as the general public. More than 70,000 people and organisations responded to Defra’s consultation on an ivory ban late last year, with over 88% of responses in favour of measures to ban ivory sales in the UK.

The number of elephants has declined by almost a third in the last decade and around 20,000 a year are still being slaughtered because of the global demand for ivory.

As profits become ever greater, the illegal wildlife trade has become a transnational organised enterprise, estimated to be worth up to £17billion a year.

Environment Secretary, Michael Gove said: "Elephants are one of the world’s most iconic animals and we must do all we can to protect them for future generations. That’s why we will introduce one of the world’s toughest bans on ivory sales. The overwhelmingly positive response to our consultation shows the strength of public feeling to protect these magnificent animals."

As announced in April’s consultation response, the Bill provides for narrowly-defined and carefully-targeted exemptions for items which do not contribute directly or indirectly to the poaching of elephants:

- Items with only a small amount of ivory. Such items must be comprised of less than 10% ivory by volume and have been made prior to 1947.

- Musical instruments. These must have an ivory content of less than 20% and have been made prior to 1975.


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Hong Kong increases wildlife smuggling jail terms

Hong Kong increased the maximum penalty for smuggling and trading endangered species yesterday from two years’ imprisonment to 10 years, as it continues its fight against elephant poaching and illegal ivory trafficking.

“Trade in endangered species is rampant in Hong Kong," said Cheryl Lo, Senior Wildlife Crime Officer for WWF-Hong Kong. "The increased penalty, coupled with strengthened enforcement, will help deter future wildlife crime offenders from using the city as a hub for smuggling and selling."

The raised penalty covers species listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) Appendix I, including ivory, rhino, the rare totoaba fish and the pangolin, which is considered the most illegally trafficked mammal in the world.

The illegal trade of species listed under Appendices II or III, including some sharks, will also be subject to a new maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment. In March, WWF-Hong Kong announced that the total volume of shark fin imported into Hong Kong had halved over the past decade, due to shipping bans and public campaigns.

Hong Kong is considered to be the largest ivory city market in the world and a major transit hub for illegal wildlife, which WWF-Hong Kong blames on low fines and sentences for traffickers and zero prosecutions of criminal kingpins.

The penalty increase is the first stage of the autonomous territory’s three-part ivory phase-out plan following China's ivory trade ban at the end of 2017.


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China Shuts Down Ivory Trade, Wildlife Trafficking Continues

China deserves credit for shutting down the illegal trading in elephant ivory that has contributed in recent years to the killing of thousands of African pachyderms.

But much credit should also go to international nongovernment organizations that have championed the elephants’ cause and raised public awareness of it in China.

On Dec. 31, 2017, China, the world’s largest ivory market, banned all domestic ivory sales.

John Gruetzner, the managing director of Intercedent, a Toronto-based, Asian-focused investment advisory group, said that the Chinese government’s decision to halt the trade was partly “a response to global pressure, including pressure from the United States."

But, says Gruetzner, the decision also came as a result of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive as well as pushback from African nations.

According to Gruetzner, Chinese government indifference in recent years had permitted the carving of elephant ivory that contributed to the killing of some 33,000 African elephants a year.

Driving the demand for ivory in China have been members of a growing Chinese middle class who in the past could never have afforded to purchase carved ivory decorations. This was a luxury that was reserved in past generations for a rich minority.

Peter Knights, the CEO of WildAid, a San Francisco-based group, described China’s ban on ivory as “the greatest single step toward reducing elephant poaching.”

The announcement of the ban led almost immediately to the closing of 172 ivory-carving factories and retail shops in China.

Poaching in Kenya also went down from 390 elephants killed in 2013 to 46 reported last year, according to the Kenya Wildlife Service.

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Cameroon Investigates Illegal Ivory, Pangolin Scales Bound for China

DOUALA, CAMEROON —

Law enforcement officials in Cameroon say investigations continue following a large discovery of illegal wildlife products hidden in shipping containers bound for China.

At least 1,000 kilograms of pangolin scales and several hundred elephant tusks were found April 6, in containers of cocoa that were to be transported to China from the Douala international airport.

Officials have not yet determined the country of origin for the contraband. Poaching of elephants and pangolins remains a problem in Cameroon; however, the country has also served as a regional hub for smugglers.

Didier Ngono, an official from the wildlife department, told VOA that three Chinese nationals have been arrested and will help police with their investigation.

Ngono says that under the law, the penalties for smuggling include fines ranging from $6,000 to $20,000 and prison sentences of between one and three years.

Cameroon has intercepted and destroyed at least two other large shipments of pangolin scales bound for Asian countries in the past two years.

Eric Kaba Tah, an official with The Last Great Ape, a nongovernmental organization that helps Cameroon enforce wildlife laws, says enforcement mechanisms remain weak.

"In 2016, two Chinese traffickers were arrested with five tons of pangolin scales that were about to be illegally exported from the country to China," Tah said. "They were given three months' imprisonment from … the one-year minimum imprisonment they were supposed to get, and this is why we are very dissatisfied. They should be given punishment that is commensurate to their crimes."

Both pangolins and elephants are considered critically endangered. International trade in pangolin and ivory is banned, yet consumer demand remains high in Asian countries, fueling the illegal market. Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy and the scales are used in traditional medicine.

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Police Arrest Elephant Poaching Ring in Irrawaddy Region

ATHEIN, Irrawaddy Region — The Forestry Police arrested an elephant poaching ring in Irrawaddy Region’s Ngapudaw Township on March 9.

Acting on a tip, combined forces from the Forestry Police, Nga Yoke Kaung sub-township police department, the Forestry Department, village administrators and Elephant Emergency Response Units (EERU) cornered the ring in Myittayar Forest Reserve in Ngapudaw Township. Two poachers were arrested and one escaped, local village tract administrator U Kyaw Myint Tun told The Irrawaddy.

“We arrested two hunters with poaching equipment. Another poacher got away, but we are going after him. We are undertaking plans to prevent elephant poaching in our region,” he said.

The two hunters who were arrested are respectively from Rakhine State’s Taungup Township and Ngapudaw Township. The third poacher from Magwe Region is still at large.

Percussion firearms, metal bolts, iron rods, arrows, gunpowder and more were seized from the poachers, according to the Forestry Police.

“It is important to arrest poachers before they kill an elephant,” said Ko Sai Zaw Oo, an official of a local elephant conservation group in Ngapudaw Township.

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Most Chinese consumers support an upcoming ban on elephant ivory in China—if they know about it

By the end of December, it will be illegal to sell or buy elephant ivory in China. But will the new and critical ban succeed in a country that’s home to the largest legal ivory market in the world?
Encouragingly, a new study shows that 86% of those surveyed support the pending ban on ivory trade in China when informed of it. Unfortunately, just 19% could recall any news of the ban unprompted—and fewer than half remembered it when prompted.

WWF and TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, commissioned a survey of more than 2,000 people across 15 Chinese cities with active ivory markets to determine how consumers may behave once the ban is in place Dec. 31. The research also investigates what motivates people to purchase ivory—and what may stop them from doing so.

China made history last year after announcing the closure of its legal elephant ivory trade by the end of 2017. Many experts around the world hailed the decision as a game changer for elephants, which poachers kill by the tens of thousands each year for their tusks, primarily to satisfy the demand for ivory products in Asia.

 

Although the ban attracted global attention and support, awareness of it within China is low—a situation that needs to change for the ban to succeed, according to the study. Of those unaware of the upcoming ban, 43% said they would still buy ivory in the future. But once informed that ivory sales and manufacturing will become illegal, that number decreased dramatically to 18%.

The fact that purchasing ivory will soon be illegal is the biggest reason why people say they’ll stop buying it—and that’s a good sign. This suggests that if the ban is both communicated effectively and enforced, it could lead to a significant drop in demand for ivory and provide a much-needed lifeline for elephants.

Promisingly, major markets such as Beijing show a significant decrease in recent sales, with demand shifting to smaller cities in which enforcement and awareness of the ban may lower.

Despite these promising trends, a small but significant percentage of people still intend to purchase ivory despite the ban. Those who regularly travel overseas to places with domestic ivory markets like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar are most likely to continue buying. The perceived social status of those who own ivory and the “artistic beauty” of carved trinkets still drive some individuals to keep buying ivory despite the ban. This suggests the need to focus efforts on changing the behavior of this group of people, which WWF intends to prioritize in the new year.

“By closing its ivory markets, China is showing its commitment to end its role in the poaching epidemic plaguing Africa’s elephants,” said Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of wildlife conservation at WWF. “It is critical that efforts to enact the ivory trade ban are accompanied by efforts to change consumer behavior in order to reduce demand. There remains strong evidence that the illegal ivory trade is still widespread both online and in unlicensed shops across China, as well as markets in neighboring countries across Asia.”

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Japan’s refusal to stop ivory trade undermines bans elsewhere

Japan has got out of implementing tough measures to clamp down on domestic sales of ivory. The move could undermine the international effort to halt the ivory trade.

Elephants are poached for the ivory in their tusks, which is sold on to consumers in Asian countries like China and Vietnam. As a result, the ivory trade is a significant threat to elephants’ survival.

Last week, the standing committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the global body that regulates trade in animal parts, met in Geneva. Several countries, particularly from Africa where elephants are poached, lobbied for CITES to force Japan to introduce a national ivory action plan. This would have forced the country to take concrete steps to clamp down, possibly including a ban on the domestic trade in antique ivory.

However, Japan managed to sidestep the proposal.

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CHINA’S VOW TO SHUT DOWN ITS IVORY TRADE BY THE END OF 2017 IS A ‘GAME CHANGER’ FOR ELEPHANTS

BEIJING — China promised Friday to halt its domestic ivory trade completely by the end of 2017, a decision greeted by environmentalists as offering real hope for an end to a poaching crisis that is wiping out tens of thousands of elephants across Africa.

“China’s announcement is a game changer for elephant conservation,” Carter Roberts, president of the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement. “The large-scale trade of ivory now faces its twilight years, and the future is brighter for wild elephants.”

China said it would begin phasing out the ivory trade in March and cease processing and trading completely by Dec. 31, 2017.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental advocacy group, said the news “may be the biggest sign of hope for elephants since the current poaching crisis began,” while Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said she was “overwhelmed with joy.”

“This is great news that will shut down the world’s largest market for elephant ivory,” said Aili Kang, Asia director at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Ivory traffickers have just lost one of their biggest markets.”

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Japan’s refusal to stop ivory trade undermines bans elsewhere

Japan has got out of implementing tough measures to clamp down on domestic sales of ivory. The move could undermine the international effort to halt the ivory trade.

Elephants are poached for the ivory in their tusks, which is sold on to consumers in Asian countries like China and Vietnam. As a result, the ivory trade is a significant threat to elephants’ survival.

Last week, the standing committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the global body that regulates trade in animal parts, met in Geneva. Several countries, particularly from Africa where elephants are poached, lobbied for CITES to force Japan to introduce a national ivory action plan. This would have forced the country to take concrete steps to clamp down, possibly including a ban on the domestic trade in antique ivory.

However, Japan managed to sidestep the proposal.

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