Posts Tagged: Elephants

Conservation — No Comments
30
Mar 10

Cracking South East Asia’s Ivory trade

Undercover investigations by TRAFFIC – the wildlife trade monitoring network of WWF and the IUCN – has put the spotlight on the scandalous ivory trade in Thailand and Burma.

In Thailand, a survey of Bangkok and Chiang Mai throughout 2008 revealed 50 more shops offering ivory items than in the previous year. In total 23,000 ivory products such as knife handles, belt buckles, jewellery and statues were found openly for sale. And staff at many of the stores had little hesitation in telling the undercover buyers about smuggling techniques and other illegal activities.

A separate operation involved staff from TRAFFIC posing as potential buyers in areas of Burma bordering Thailand and China. They found 9,000 pieces of ivory and 16 whole tusks for sale. Shockingly, they also uncovered evidence that about 250 live Asian elephants have been smuggled into Thailand from Burma over the last decade. Once there they are used for tourist trekking or street begging.

Taken together, the findings suggest poor policing and a blatant disregard for international conventions and national laws. Neither Burma nor Thailand has reported cross-border trade in live elephants to CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), and Thailand has reported only two ivory seizures (totalling 1.2 tonnes of raw ivory) since 2004.

The discoveries also raise concerns that the legal trade in domesticated elephants is providing cover for illegal trade in wild, highly-endangered Asian elephants.

Tom Milliken , of TRAFFIC, says: “Thailand has consistently been identified as one of the world’s top five countries most heavily implicated in the illicit ivory trade, but shows little sign of addressing the problem. The government needs to reassess its policy for controlling its local ivory markets .”

The reports’ findings are being used to put pressure on authorities in both countries to work together to tackle the problem, and to warn tourists about the issues involved and products to avoid. This work forms a key part of our efforts to reduce illegal trade in major markets for elephant products and help governments enforce restrictions on the trade.

Conservation — No Comments
7
Jan 10

It’s a dirty job…

February, 2007

Inspecting elephant dung may not be everyone’s idea of the perfect job, but as Andy Kenworthy found out, it is a key part of WWF’s efforts to conserve the endangered Borneo pygmy elephant.

It takes some serious foliage to hide an elephant, even a pygmy one. Borneo has serious foliage, enough to keep groups of up to 100 of these rare 2.5m high mini-jumbos from the gaze of all but the most determined of humans.

But it’s not enough to deter Engelbert Joseph, Jabanus Muin and Herman Francis from WWF-Malaysia’s elephant monitoring team. Their working day is spent in the sort of jungle conditions used to harden the world’s Special Forces, tracking the elephants themselves and studying their leavings when they are out of sight.

The team counts the number of droppings, measures the distance between them, and notes anything unusual along the way. They also study dung decomposition, comparing how fast it degenerates in the open and in the jungle, so they can estimate the age of each dropping when out tracking.

Occasionally, they DNA test samples for inbreeding, a risk among this small remaining population. In 2005, they also began the largest satellite tracking study of elephants ever conducted in Asia, studying the pygmy elephants by attaching satellite collars to five of them.

“Some times the day is quite easy, some times are really hard,” Jabanus told me. “And it can be dangerous.”

Engelbert was an elephant trainer before he became a tracker and his expertise with these animals has featured on television documentaries. But he still keeps a canister of pepper spray handy as he bends over some dung with his tape measure, to deter charging elephants in an emergency.

He has been charged by elephants many times, and kicked more than once, but his love for them remains undaunted. He and the rest of the team provide important research information on elephant numbers, their health and their diet – data which can be used to find out how the herds are coping with the changing world around them.

And there is no doubt it is changing, fast, because the trees which shelter the elephants are also a vital source of income for Malaysia’s economy. Most of the forest around them is scheduled to be cut again in the coming years.

So as well as a game of high tension hide and seek, this is a race against time – to prove to the world how magnificent and important the Borneo pygmy elephant is, and inspire the action needed to save them, before it is too late.