The agony and the ivory

Elephants, tigers, leopards, gorillas… not only do we want a world with space for such creatures, but the forests and wild lands in which they thrive are vital to the future of a healthy planet. So a new WWF campaign to crack on down on illegal trade in threatened species is timely indeed, says WWF's Peter Denton.

How do you kill an elephant? With a gun, of course. But what if you don’t want the sound of your bolt-action rifle to reverberate through the forest? Well, steep a heavy nail in poison, fix it to a bamboo shaft, aim it at the unfortunate beast, and shoot it with a crossbow.

Sounds improbable? If only... But exactly this method was used recently by a poacher in one of India’s national parks. Quite apart from the cold barbarity of the act, it illustrates the ingenuity to which poachers will go to nail their quarry - in this case, quite literally. The animal took days to die a painful death. Then the killers moved in and hacked off its great tusks, no doubt to the relief of the world’s continuing ivory trade.

It’s part of an illegal industry worth some £5 billion a year, supplying as it does a luxury market where the end product is regarded as white gold. Hungry participants range from organised crime merchants to individual souvenir hunters.

Twenty years ago, entire elephant populations faced extinction as poachers killed to collect their tusks and make an instant profit. But a series of WWF initiatives, ranging from lobbying governments to enabling special patrols to protect the elephants, were key to an international ban in ivory trade which came into force in 1990. Since then, elephant numbers have recovered in some parts of the world. But the task of saving tuskers is far from over. The trouble is, what’s legal in one country may not be in another. So while it may be perfectly okay to sell ivory trinkets in, say, Zimbabwe, it is illegal somewhere else, like, say…the United Kingdom.

But lest you feel momentarily righteous, read on. In Britain, it is indeed against the law to buy or sell ivory, or anything else on the ‘A’ list of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) - a register of the most threatened animals and plants in the world. But that doesn’t prevent a depressingly thriving illegal market which feeds any number of local people who want to own wildlife products at almost any price.

Need proof? Just think back to a court case in London last December, when a man running a taxidermy shop was jailed on 41 counts of possessing specimens of some of the world’s rarest wildlife. A stuffed tiger cub less than a week old, for example. Ivory, turtle and chimpanzee products. A gorilla skull, an elephant foot and a leopard. All available to an eager array of cash customers, all offered for open sale in of one of the best-educated, most wildlife-aware countries in the world.

And here’s another thought from the home front: last year, no fewer than 52,000 illegal wildlife items were seized at Britain’s ports and airports, predominantly from tourists. Little wonder, then, that WWF and TRAFFIC, our wildlife trade monitoring programme, are about to launch a high-profile campaign of public awareness.

But we’re not just concerned with ivory, of course. The WWF/TRAFFIC campaign is involved with other endangered species as well, especially the snow leopard, the whale shark (which can live more than 100 years) and something that spends a lifetime in one place - the big-leafed mahogany.

The latter is an extremely valuable timber product. Very slow-growing and increasingly vulnerable, it has evaded the attention of CITES - but not the consumer. We turn it into everything from lavatory seats to coffins, and the UK is the fourth largest importer of mahogany in the world.

The campaign will be launched in January - part of our build-up to the next gathering of CITES signatory states, due to be held in Chile in November, when more than 150 national delegations will meet to discuss international wildlife trade and the limits to which it is being stretched. The aim of our campaign is to bring the impacts of illegal trade in wildlife firmly to the forefront of the public’s mind (and that, crucially, includes business), and to work with CITES countries so that a lasting reduction in illegal wildlife trade becomes not so much a goal, more a reality.

Peter Denton is WWF-UK’s principal writer.
01483 426444   pdenton@wwf.org.uk

26 September 2001

Peter Denton