Tag Archives: elephants

Great News for the Forest Elephants in Dzanga-Sanga National Park

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The following release has come from the Wildlife Conservation Society. I hope security has returned to the bai. Michael Fay, who brokered the agreement between the Central African Republic and Gabon that will allow Gabonese soldiers to help safeguard the forest elephants in the trinational World Heritage Site, is in Bayanga, presumably making sure the elephants in the bai are not attacked again. Fay is a major hero in my book as is Andrea Turkalo, who has spent 23 years observing and protecting the elephants in the bai. They were married for many years and in the Peace Corps in the northern CAR, when a massive slaughter of the elephants there was being done by the jinjaweed, mounted marauders from Sudan who carried off the tusks on camels. This is how they got into devoted their lives to the elephants.
WCS Praises Agreement Between
Gabon and Central African Republic Aimed at Improved Management of CAR’s Protected Areas

NEW YORK  (May 18, 2013) —The following statement was released today by the Wildlife Conservation Society President and CEO Cristián Samper in response to the news that Gabon has agreed to help improve the management of the Central African Republic’s protected areas, which are currently threatened by large-scale elephant poaching for ivory, and that security has returned to Dzanga-Sangha National Park.

At least two dozen elephants were killed in Dzanga-Sangha National Park in the Central African Republic, part of the Sangha Trinational World Heritage Site, earlier this month. The Dzanga-Sangha National Park contains “Dzanga Bai,” a spectacular forest clearing, where between 50 and 200 elephants gather daily to ingest mineral salts present in the soil.

Samper’s statement is followed by the full news release issued by Gabon.

WCS’s Dr. Cristián Samper said:

“The good news from Dzanga-Sangha National Park after reports of extensive elephant poaching comes as a huge relief, along with the agreement that Gabon and the Central African Republic have agreed to work together to improve management of CAR’s protected areas. We offer our appreciation to the leadership being shown by acting president of the Central African Republic transitional government, Michel Djotodia, and to President of Gabon, Ali Bongo Ondimba. I want to extend appreciation and congratulations also to a team from Gabon Parks led by Dr. Mike Fay, Senior Conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Special Adviser to the President of Gabon, for working with partners to secure the area and its world-famous elephants. WCS stands ready to assist the government and people of CAR, our partners in Gabon and the United States, and our long-term partner in Dzanga-Sangha, WWF, in working for a better future for the people and wildlife in Central Africa.”

The following is the news release from the Gabon government:

(Libreville, May 17, 2013) – Upon arrival in Gabon on Wednesday, May 14, 2013, the President of the Central African Republic transition, SE Michel Djotodia was received by the President of Gabon, HE Ali Bongo Ondimba. Among other important issues discussed, including the important role of Gabonese troops in the regional peace keeping force, Michel Djotodia sought and obtained the support of Gabon to improve management of Central African Republic’s protected areas system, which is currently threatened by large-scale elephant poaching for ivory.

At least twenty-six elephants were killed in Dzanga Sangha National Park earlier this month in the forest of Dzanga Bai, a World Heritage site in the south-west of the Central African Republic. The Dzanga-Ndoki National Park contains the “Dzanga Bai,” which is a large forest clearing, unique in the world, where between 50 and 200 elephants gather daily to drink mineral salts present in the soil.

“The first time I visited Dzanga Bai, I was immediately captivated by the wonders one of the most fascinating natural wonders of the world, ” said Professor Lee White, the Executive Secretary of ANPN. “This is one of those places that every human being should be able to see in his or her lifetime. It is officially recognized as a World Heritage Site, and our world would not be complete should we lose a global natural treasure such as the Dzanga Bai,” he continued.

In recent weeks this area drew intense poaching pressure as law and order in the country broke down. Some of these attacks may also have been the result of local poachers who took advantage of the situation.

A delegation from the ANPN led by Dr. Mike Fay, Senior Conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Special Adviser to the President of the Republic, who participated in the classification of Dzanga –Ndoki National Park 30 years ago, was dispatched on Thursday 16 May to Bayanga, Central African Republic, to work with the government on a strategy to secure the area and restore conservation activities.

The delegation reported this morning that security has returned. Government authorities in Bayanga are monitoring the situation closely and working with conservation staff to ensure no further poaching occurs.

“Now the work of restoring protection and augmenting capacity must be undertaken in earnest,” said Dr. Richard Ruggiero of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “It is clear from our experience over the years that protecting elephants also protects people, since conservation hubs become islands of improved governance. International cooperation helps both people and wildlife.”

Share the experience of the National Parks Agency of Gabon Cooperation between Gabon and the Central African Republic is intended to promote protected areas management and will address:

*   The establishment of a legal and institutional framework to respond to the challenges posed by protected area development and management.
*   Development of a National Parks Agency in CAR.
*   Training of staff working for the conservation and management of protected areas.
*   Establishing improved relations with conservation programs in other countries of the Central African Region to share experiences, address cross-border poaching threats, and to develop beneficial collaborations with the global conservation community.

“This agreement is a great example of a ‘south / south cooperation’” said Professor Lee White. “Africa has lost 70% of its forest elephants in 10 years and even in Gabon, where we have been less affected, 30% of our elephants have been killed during this period. We hope that we can help our colleagues in CAR to preserve Dzanga-Sangha, which is one of the most important protected areas in Africa and to restore the other protected areas that were once the countries pride and joy.”

Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba expressed the hope that regional institutions (ECCAS, COMIFAC, RAPAC) and Conservation NGOs will accompany Gabon and Central African Republic in responding to this challenge. “There is a clear link between blood ivory and civil instability in Africa, making this much more than just an environmental issue. We should all work together to restore sound governance in CAR, which will protect both its people and its spectacular wildlife.”

 

sickening news for forest elephants

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got this from Melissa Groo, who does Save the Elephants’ daily roundup of new stories about elephants around the world. Melissa (who is also a phenomenal bird photographer. we spent the last week of March on the Platte River in Nebraska where 600,000 sandhill cranes were doing their dances and fueling up for the trip north to their nesting grounds) spent two three month seasons in the early 2000s at Dzanga Bai, assisting Katy Payne, who was recording the ultrasound communications among its forest elephants, so she is as shattered as I to learn that what we have been dreading ever since the Central African Republic exploded and the Seleka rebels have been raping and pillaging and killing has come to pass. It was inevitable that they would find out about the elephants in the bai, all that ivory free for the taking. And so what to me was the most magical Eden I have ever been to in my fifty-five years of world traveling is gone. I described it at the end of my 2011 Vanity Fair piece, “Agony and Ivory,” (see Dispatch 69), and Guillaume Bonn photographed the elephants in the bai. I feel like it was I, or my family, who was slaughtered. Paradise lost, Melissa emailed. Among the photos that keep rotating on the title page of this site is a snap I took in the bai of Juno 2 and her daughter. Juno 2 was the most beautiful elephant I have ever seen, the Cleopatra of elephants, slender with perfect ears and pink-tipped trunk and feet. Of course this was from a human point of view. I hope she and her daughter weren’t in the bai when the 17 Seleka armed with AK 47′s arrived  and started mowing down the ones in the clearing from the observation platform. Fortunately, Andrea Turkalo, the noble woman who had been watching and watching over the elephants in the bai since l990 (she was able to identify 4000 individual elephants) got out before the Seleka came. Here’s the story :

Poachers have entered one of Africa’s most unique elephant habitats on Monday, threatening to cause an elephant massacre. Posted on 07 May 2013

© WWF-Canon / Martin Harvey

Poachers have entered one of Africa’s most unique elephant habitats on Monday, threatening to cause one of the biggest elephant massacres in the region since poachers killed at least 300 elephants for their ivory in Cameroon’s Bouba N’Djida National Park in February 2012.

According to WWF sources, a group of 17 armed individuals on Monday entered the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park and headed for the Dzanga Bai, locally known as the “village of elephants”, a large clearing where between 50 and 200 elephants congregate every day to drink mineral salts present in the sands.

Two WWF-supported local researchers said that three members of this group armed with Kalashnikov rifles approached them in the forest on Monday, asking for food and directions to the viewing tower at the Dzanga Bai, which is used by scientists and tourists to observe elephants. After giving a false lead, these sources immediately ran away and heard gunshots coming from the Bai on their way into hiding.

Also on Monday, two ecoguards said they saw they saw armed individuals on the Dzanga Bai observation platform shooting in the direction of elephants. While going into hiding, these sources said they saw the vehicle which had transported the 17 gunmen parked at the entrance of the park.

WWF calls on the international community to help restore peace and order in the Central African Republic, which has been rocked by violence and chaos since the beginning of the year, and to help preserve this unique World Heritage Site.

Jim Leape, WWF International Director General, said:

“Unless swift and decisive action is taken, it appears highly likely that poachers will take advantage of the chaos and instability of the country to slaughter the elephants living in this unique World Heritage Site.

“Wildlife crime is not only a consequence of instability, but a cause. It fuels violence in the region, in a vicious circle that undermines the stability of these countries and their economic development..

“Central African Republic has to immediately follow through on its promise of two weeks ago to mobilise troops to end poaching in the region. WWF also calls on the international community to immediately provide assistance to Central African Republic in restoring peace and order in the country, and to preserve its unique natural heritage.

“We also urge Cameroon and Republic of Congo to provide support to the Central African Republic in preserving this World Heritage Site, which not only encompasses the Bai, but also includes large neighbouring areas of these two countries.

“Finally, ivory consumer country governments, and notably China and Thailand, must redouble their efforts to end demand – the root cause of the extermination of elephants across Africa.”

 

 

 

 

 

the battle for the elephants is raging

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last year more elephants were killed than in 2011, which was when my piece, “Agony and Ivory,” came out in Vanity Fair, and 2011 was the worst year in twenty years, when the last, Japan-consumer-driven pogrom on pachyderms took place. The piece was followed by hard-hitting reportage by the National Geographic and the New York Times’ Nairobi correspodant, and helped launch a huge global campaign to stop the slaughter, but the poachers, most of them being illiterate and none of them getting these publications,  have failed to get the word. The money is too good, so the elephants are being killed mercilessly and without compunction all over the continent. One set of tusks can net a poacher as much he would make in a year honestly. And the Chinese don’t want to hear that they shouldn’t buy ivory statues and bangles.  But the Chinese and Thai governments in the face of international censure and growing domestic outrage have promised to take steps to curb the rampant illegal trade in their countries. But the pressure must be kept on if these magnificent animals are to survive. Every day brings news of new slaughter in Gabon, Chad, Cameroon, Kenya and the elephants other African range states, the poisoning of endangered pygmy elephants in Borneo, another fatal elephant-human conflict in India. The just-concluded CITES conference was one of the most productive ever. Here’s a story about it Wildlife trade meeting endorses DNA testing of seized ivory
Daniel Cressey, Nature
14 March 2013

Protection for elephants, rhinos, sharks and trees extended in Bangkok.
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If you go into a bar in Bangkok tonight, don’t be surprised if you find it full of celebrating conservationists.

An international meeting that takes place every three years to regulate trade in endangered animals and plants has bolstered protection for multiple species. Besides clamping down on trade in ivory and rhino horn, states party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) made the unprecedented step of granting protection to sharks and various species of tropical timber in final voting today.

Tom Milliken, who works for the wildlife-trade monitoring group TRAFFIC, which is headquartered in Cambridge, UK and has been heavily involved in the debates about elephant poaching, said, “I think this is one of the best COPs I’ve been to, and I’ve been to 14 of them.”

Before the conference, researchers across the world had warned of the dire state of African elephant populations, which are currently being decimated by rampant poaching. Many urged CITES to mandate forensic examination of large seizures of illegal ivory. Tusks’ DNA can be used to trace their origins, so that law enforcement can be directed to ‘hot spots’ of poaching. The ‘conference of the parties’ (COP) to the convention in Bangkok declared that such testing should be mandatory for large-scale seizures.

“I was ecstatic because it was the first time that the entire COP acknowledged the value and need for DNA testing for the origin of poached ivory. All my hard work had finally paid off,” Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the driving forces behind the push for forensic examinations of elephant ivory, said in an email to Nature.

The delegates also approved measures to curb demand for ivory, which could include public awareness campaigns in countries driving the trade, such as China. Shortly before the meeting, Tanzania removed one impediment to the discussion by withdrawing its proposal to sell stockpiled ivory, a move welcomed by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK and the founder of the Save the Elephants charity.

“For the first time in 22 years there was no proposal to sell ivory. That meant we could start interacting constructively,” he says. Douglas-Hamilton adds that the demand-reduction move means that “we can now say with our hand on our heart that CITES supports campaigns to reduce the trade in ivory”.

Enforcement of rhino protection is to be strengthened, with Mozambique and Vietnam now required to toughen up their controls on trade in horns. Members of CITES also accepted that several species of shark — including the oceanic whitetip (Carcharhinus longimanus), scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrma lewini), great hammerhead shark (Sphyrna mokarran), smooth hammerhead shark (Sphyrna zigaena) and porbeagle (Lamna nasus) — should be added to ‘appendix II’ of the convention, which restricts trade in species not at immediate risk of extinction but in need of protection. Previously CITES delegates have hesitated to interfere with trade in commercially valuable marine species, say many campaigners.

Conservationists see the move into timber as equally significant, with a number of types of tropical hardwoods, including ebonies and rosewoods, added to appendix II. “At the last CITES conference in Qatar I felt we didn’t get anything we wanted. This conference was entirely different,” says Leigh Henry, a senior policy advisor at the conservation NGO WWF in Washington, DC. “The parties to CITES are really stepping up. We got almost everything we wanted. The parties followed the science and did what was best for conservation.”

Article at the following link:
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 For more background, read #69: Agony and Ivory

 

 

A third hard-hitting article on the ivory trade

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this one “Blood Ivory” in the current National Geographic. It has a lot of undercover reportage about the Phillipine, Thai, and Chinese ivory market, as Andrew Revkin reports in his blog : http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/a-report-exposes-how-the-chinese-government-is-fueling-elephant-slaughter/

here’s the link. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/10/ivory/christy-text

well worth reading. let’s hope it and the one in the Times do some good. the time so stop this slaughter is now. the more exposees and noise that can be made the better. well done nat geo !

new york times editorial on elephant slaughter

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Elephant Slaughter Editorial, New York Times

September 8, 2012
Not long ago it looked as though elephant poaching in Africa was on the downswing, in part because of more rigorous enforcement of a global ban on trade in most elephant ivory imposed in 1989. That moment is gone and with it, elephants in the tens of thousands every year. These astonishing creatures, which seem more intelligent and emotionally aware the more we know about them, are being gunned down by poachers for their ivory tusks at a fast pace — the worst slaughter seen since the 1980s.

Poaching used to be a relatively low-tech horror, but it has entered the 21st century with a vengeance. Entire herds, the young and old, are being shot at from military helicopters and on the ground, their tusks cut out, the carcasses left to rot. As Jeffrey Gettleman has reported in The Times, ivory poaching has been militarized, overwhelming government rangers. A horrific convergence is taking place: soldiers of all kinds killing the animals, organized criminals moving the ivory, and China displaying its unceasing appetite for contraband from the wild.

Ivory is an easy source of revenue, for impoverished villagers and armies alike. The military poachers seem to come from everywhere. They include Janjaweed raiders from Sudan, Congolese soldiers, members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, Ugandan soldiers firing from helicopters, adherents of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army and even the Shabab, a militant Islamist group. The trade routes go through Somalia, Sudan and Kenya, in the east, and the Gulf of Guinea in the west. But overwhelmingly the ivory goes to a single place: China. Nothing will change until China faces up to its role in the devastation of elephants and other wild species. China is the major investor in much of Africa, and it could put enormous pressure on the poaching rings if it wanted.

The delicate question, as always, is how to put pressure on China. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to do so. But the State Department has been slow to acknowledge the possible implications of American military aid in Africa, especially in Uganda, Congo and South Sudan. By paying for fuel so Ugandan troops can continue the hunt for Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, the United States may well be paying to fuel elephant poaching.

The elephants in central Africa cannot survive this cross-fire. What makes poaching possible at this level isn’t simply the emergence of military poachers, or the fact that rangers are outgunned and outmanned. It’s also the continuing failure of central African states, especially Congo. But behind it all is the market that makes ivory so valuable, a market that thrives in the unfailed state of China.

The United States and other nations must do everything they can to police the consequences of their aid in Africa while keeping the pressure on China. What awaits central Africa otherwise is a wasteland and the decimation of this noble animal.

the latest grim news about the ongoing slaughter of africa’s elephants

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/africa/africas-elephants-are-being-slaughtered-in-poaching-frenzy.html

and Andrew Revkin’s blog about it, with a kind appreciation of my 2010 Vanity Fair piece, “Agony and Ivory”

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/a-searing-look-at-ties-between-africas-wars-and-the-ivory-trade/

ethical priorities

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Innocent elephants are being killed in Africa, innocent civilizians are being killed in Syria. A few days back I read that 100 Syrian civilians had been killed the day before by the government of the ruthlessly authoritarian obviously doomed to fall Assad, the same estimated daily rate as the ongoing slaughter of Africa’s elephants. This is the sort of connection that my generalist mind makes out of all the pieces of information it is constantly absorbing.

So which is more disturbing to you ? If you were a philanthropist, where would you put your money, to save the Syrians or the elephants. An interesting ethical question I’d love to start a dialogue on.