In Botswana, poaching deaths are declining, but sport hunting is taking up some of that slack. But some deaths (the annual mortality percentage is in bold black type) apparently went unrecorded, as less than 1 percent of the population is listed as dying each year. Source: Wildnet Africa. Data: Department of Wildlife & National Parks (Botswana).
Tusks: Elephants use them for stripping trees, moving stuff, fighting and display.
But humans have developed other uses for tusks -- or ivory -- which, unfortunately, only work if the elephant is dead: things like jewelry, piano keys and billiard balls.
Although ivory has been revered for its lustrous allure for centuries, large-scale killing of elephants for ivory did not begin until about 1900. That's when the "great white hunters" started storming through Africa with their large-bore elephant guns. Yet in the 1930s, an estimated 5 to 10 million elephants remained across the continent.
As poaching flourished in Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, it was the big operators -- as usual -- who profited most. While poachers received an estimated $2 to $3 per kilogram for ivory, dealers got 100 times that price. And yet the "street price" was enough to ensure the continual destruction of the elephant, particularly the older animals, with their larger tusks.
According to new research on Indian elephants, selecting elephants on the basis of tusk size could harm the animals genetics. Animals with the longest tusks have the fewest parasites, and thus seem to have better immune systems (see "Longer Tusks Are Healthy Signs" in the bibliography).
Pathetic pachyderms
During the 1980s, elephants became the poster children of the conservation movement, and for good reason. Between 1979 and 1992, their numbers plunged from 1.3 million to about 600,000. Elephants -- social animals that live in matriarchal groups and seem to mourn their dead -- were easy for humans to identify with. Photos of vultures devouring dead, tuskless animals helped arouse a conservation movement that eventually opted for a simple solution: cut off the market for ivory, and you'd cut off the incentive to poach.
That drive culminated in 1989, when the United-Nations-sponsored CITES convention banned ivory sales. Although the move helped stabilize elephant populations, it was also true that elephants had grown scarce in some countries with the worst poaching, like Kenya, and Congo.
But success had its price: As a result of the ivory ban and effective conservation work, elephants populations have boomed in southern Africa, and the big beasts have been trampling crops and harassing villagers.
The resurgence of elephants in southern Africa posed a dilemma for wildlife authorities. Elephants are a keystone species -- an essential element of the African savanna that attracts intense touristic interest. But if elephants were no longer endangered in southern Africa, shouldn't African countries be allowed to sell ivory to fund conservation programs?
On the other hand, many onlookers worried that the CITES relaxation would be the first step on a slippery slope -- a starting gun for poachers who had had some trouble unloading ivory during the CITES ban. (Indeed, in 1996, cops grabbed over a ton of ivory in Taiwan.) And to some animal welfare advocates, the elephant is so comely, so human-like that it deserves protection even at the expense of humans who happen to cohabit the same land.
CITES tried to solve that dilemma by establishing a trial period of ivory sales, during which the three African countries will have to demonstrate that they can sell ivory without creating a black market. In Zimbabwe, ivory sales will become part of a unique and controversial conservation solution.
