The War on Ivory

A recent analysis of seized ivory records shows a disturbing increase in the illegal trade. According to WWF, this pattern suggests more activity from organized crime syndicates, which seem to have become stronger in the past decade.

Kenyan wildlife officials blame the sale of confiscated tusks that took place last year. While the UN supervised, enough ivory to have come from 10,000 elephants was put up on the auction block by several African countries for buyers from China and Japan. Although the ivory is supposed to be tracked to prevent it from being sold overseas, conservationists fear that the influx of ivory gave poachers an opening to slip illegal ivory into the market, too. The last condoned sale, which took place almost a decade earlier, didn't seem to yield a spike in illegal trade, but what are the odds that it's a coincidence that the first spike to hit the ivory trade in years comes right on the heels of the big auction?

In good news, last month Kenyan wildlife officials reported on the largest-ever, international anti-poaching operation, which seized tons of illegal ivory and led to the arrests of hundreds of people across six Eastern Africa states.

Much of the ivory was detected by conservation dogs, a relatively new addition to the anti-poaching arsenal. Conservation dogs are being used around the world to sniff out smugglers (similar to the way dogs have been employed for years to detect drugs and bombs). They're also being used in wildlife research to confirm the presence of animals in their natural habitats and locate biological information left behind in, um, biological deposits (a.k.a. scat). (On a side note, dogs with an instinct for guarding livestock are being dispatched for nonlethal predator control. The Wind River Bear Institute has started using Karelian Bear Dogs as part of a program to re-teach bears who have become complacent around civilization that they don't want to interact with humans.)

Just like with the fur trade, the biggest obstacle in stopping the ivory trade is the fact that there's still an end market, one that's lucrative enough for poachers to keep killing elephants. Unfortunately, also as with the fur trade, the U.S. is one of the top buyers of ivory. In 2002, the U.S. was identified as one of ten countries with insufficient regulations (including, again like fur, loopholes that allow for mislabeling) and weak enforcement of the international ivory trade ban. So far, that hasn't been fixed.

Photo credit: wwarby