"Please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of goodwill: let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God's plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment. Let us not allow omens of destruction and death to accompany the advance of this world!"
- Pope Francis, March 19
Destruction and Death, as Pope Francis offered this homily in St. Peter's Square, had just left the scene in the central African nation of Chad, where in a single night in mid-March 89 elephants were slaughtered for their tusks. Reports described the ivory poachers as 50 or so men on camel and horseback, speaking Arabic, armed with AK-47s, and presumed to be the same band that came over from Sudan last year to execute more than 450 elephants in Cameroon -- on that foray, dispatching their victims with rocket-propelled grenades.
In Chad, near the Cameroon border to the south, they left their mark by sparing not even the 33 pregnant females and 15 elephant calves, and by hacking off the tusks while some of the creatures were still alive. There were four park rangers on duty that night, short a fifth guard who was murdered by poachers last year. But they were far away at the time, and, in any case, would have been helpless against overwhelming force. Among other problems, the elephant preserve is about 850 square miles, a big stretch of creation for just four guys to protect.
A United Nations Rapid Response Assessment (the UN may be slow to act, but the assessments come quick) puts last year's losses around 32,000 African elephants, as compared to 2011 casualties of 25,000, reporting "mass and gruesome killings of elephants." From the air, as correspondent Bryan Christy of National Geographic writes from Cameroon, it looks like this: "[T]he scattered bodies present a senseless crime scene - you can see which animals fled, which mothers tried to protect their young, how one terrified herd of 50 went down together."
From the air, too, is how they're often slaughtered -- in numbers, Christy thinks, perhaps double those UN estimates. It's guesswork, more speculative than ever as poachers pick up the pace in military-style operations that now include firing their AK-47s from helicopters. Like the more advanced weaponry of the killers, their night-vision goggles and other such assets, and the sheer number of them aswarm in Africa, the helicopters signal yet another bad turn in this old struggle. There's big money in ivory, a boundless market for it, and everyone knows where most of it is heading.
It's China, where status seekers simply must have ivory trinkets, jewelry, and statues to proclaim their new wealth. Apparently, nothing in Chinese says "I've arrived" like a carved tusk, and they go for about $1,300 a pound or more these days -- many times what it used to be -- or as much as $50,000 for a sizable pair of tusks on the street in China. Tusks on the market are getting smaller because the elephants are dying younger. All but a few with fully grown tusks have vanished. A ton of ivory now -- and smuggled shipments actually deal in such quantities -- involves a lot more grief in the taking.
The government of Kenya reports that 90 percent of ivory smugglers caught there are Chinese citizens. One fellow was picked up recently with 439 pieces of ivory on him, and in a Nairobi courtroom fined less than a dollar for each. Kenyan authorities vow to enact harsher penalties to "fight poachers at all levels to save our elephants," and other governments had better do the same, quickly. It is getting out by every route, at airports, in large containers at seaports on either coast of Africa, in small fishing vessels, or simply by mail, and most of the ivory is bound for China. The rest goes to Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and other Asian friends of the United States, in routine disregard of the ivory ban that the United States led a generation ago. Africa's finite supply is meeting Asia's furious demand at a rate of nearly a hundred kills every 24 hours. The death count, that one night in Chad, is the continent's daily average.
