KENYA: IT IS TIME TO ACT ON ELEPHANT POACHING

Source: The Star
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By Winnie Kiiru, 11 January 2013

Elephants. Photo: Kevin Walsh

 

Poaching of both rhino and elephant has reached alarming levels in Kenya. The recent killing of a family of 12 elephants in Tsavo East National Park by a gang of poachers has raised the level of alarm both nationally and internationally.

Several factors have been cited to explain the upsurge in poaching in Kenya and indeed the rest of Africa. The most important factor has been the growth of the Chinese economy with a growing middle exhibiting an insatiable appetite for ivory.

It is on record that the average Chinese person is unaware that an elephant has to die for their tusks or horn to be removed. They believe that tusks and horns are harvested from live animals and that they grow again like teeth.

Reducing the demand for ivory is the key to ending this tragic loss of elephants. This calls for stricter law enforcement in China and transit countries that facilitate the movement and sale of ivory and public education and awareness campaigns to ensure that the people of China understand the impact of the ivory trade on Elephants.

Equally important are the decisions made by the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Trade in ivory was banned in 1989 after the unprecedented slaughter of African elephants during the 1970s and 1980s. The elephants were placed under the highest level of protection by CITES and all international trade in ivory banned.

In subsequent years, CITES has allowed some elephant populations to be down listed, affording them less protection and allowing trade in ivory from these populations.

CITES also made the unfortunate decision to allow China to buy ivory from these countries despite glaring evidence that the trade controls in China were inadequate resulting in high volumes of illegal trade. The next CITES Conference of Parties is coming up in March this year.

To save elephants from decimation, the parties will be called upon to support a proposal by members states of the African Elephant Coalition led by Kenya to amend the text of the CITES convention towards tightening ivory trade controls.

A third factor in the trade is the challenge faced by elephant range states in securing free ranging elephants and rhinos and protecting them from poaching.

The investment required to provide security for these animals is a major strain on government departments. Kenya Wildlife Service is one of the best wildlife management agencies in Africa.

South African National parks are equally highly regarded. It is notable that in 2011 and 2012, both agencies recorded unprecedented levels of poaching despite having highly trained, well equipped and dedicated personnel. It is scary to imagine what is happening to elephants and rhinos in countries that are less well prepared to fight the poaching menace.

Equally important is the weak penalties afforded to those found guilty of killing and trading in wildlife trophies across Africa. Wildlife crime has traditionally been viewed as low level crime and the impact of the loss on national economies has remained a hidden cost.

This is despite evidence that the global wildlife trafficking is as profitable as the illicit drugs trade and the illegal arms trade to the underworld.

To stem the poaching menace, wildlife crime must be recognized for its impact on African economies and be treated accordingly in the national laws.

Stiff penalties for wildlife crimes are bound to be a deterrent. In Kenya, the wildlife act has been under review since 2006 and it is unfortunate that parliament is coming to the end of session without passing this law that would have afforded stiffer penalties for offenders. In the absence of this law, the legal fraternity must scrutinize other statutes in our laws that can be used to punish offenders.

Finally, public outrage is an important aspect in causing the government to pay attention to the poaching menace. Unfortunately this is lacking in Kenya.

Kenya is in the middle of heightened political activity. Politicians will only pay attention to what they perceive to be important to the citizens.
Wildlife based tourism contributes significantly to Kenya's GDP and it is strange that the tourism industry remains silent when wildlife is being killed at unprecedented rates. It is equally disturbing that communities that are bound to suffer the most as the poaching menace threatens tourism remain silent.

There seems to be a pervasive view that wildlife in Kenya belongs to KWS. This is far from the truth. Wildlife is a natural heritage bestowed upon this country for us and our children and we need to get angry when a band of criminals choose to profit and decimate our natural resources.

Dr. Winnie Kiiru is the director CHD-Conservation Kenya and a trustee at the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Link:
http://allafrica.com/stories/201301111380.html?viewall=1

IVORY TRADE NATIONS FACE THREAT OF SANCTIONS

Source: McCLATCHY

Original source: asiancorrespondent.com

Via: africageographic.com

BANGKOK (AP) — Top conservation organizations warned Wednesday that the illegal ivory trade is hastening the decline of Africa’s already endangered elephant population, and said they are ready to punish nations that are lax in fighting the problem.

“Globally, illegal ivory trade activity has more than doubled since 2007, and is now over three times larger than it was in 1998,” said a report issued in Bangkok at a meeting of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

CITES has put three African and five Asian nations on notice that they have failed to adequately crack down on the ivory trade, and that by next week they must come up with a detailed and credible plan of action for curbing the trade across and within their borders. They must also meet those targets or face trade sanctions next year.

The nations threatened with sanctions are Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and China. Sanctions would keep those nations from trading even in legal wildlife products by barring other CITES member nations from buying from them.

A CITES-led project that monitors about 40 percent of Africa’s elephant population estimated that 17,000 elephants were illegally killed in 2011, and the numbers are probably the same or greater for last year, said the report, produced by CITES, the U.N. Environment Program, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, better known as TRAFFIC.

The report said the increased poaching and loss of habitat threaten the survival of elephant populations in Central Africa and undermine previously more secure populations in West, Southern and East Africa.
Curbing the ivory trade is a major topic for the CITES meeting, attended by about 2,000 delegates representing 178 governments, businesses, non-governmental organizations and groups speaking for indigenous peoples.

The report, “Elephants in the Dust — The African Elephant Crisis,” said criminal networks are increasingly active and entrenched in the trafficking of ivory between Africa and Asia. “Training of enforcement officers in the use of tracking, intelligence networks and innovative techniques, such as forensic analysis, is urgently needed,” it said.

Officials from the conservation groups said CITES is also putting pressure on governments of nations found to be key links in the chain of the illegal ivory trade.

Tom Milliken, TRAFFIC’s ivory expert, said he hopes the current CITES meeting will hold accountable those countries that are “serious offenders.” He said it was very evident that “unregulated domestic ivory markets continue to fester in many places.”

“Where there is not action to address this issue I am hopeful that the CITES parties will move forward with sanctions that would suspend trade in wildlife with those countries,” Milliken told reporters.

Thailand is one of the countries that could be badly hurt by sanctions. It conducts a profitable legal trade in several wildlife items, especially orchids and farmed crocodile products. In addressing the opening of the CITES conference, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra declared the country was committed to stamping out the trade, but spoke in vague terms.

“We were warned about the sanctions but we already reported back to them and presented our plans,” Theerapat Prayurasiddhi, deputy director-general of Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, told The Associated Press. “They said the plans were decent but they wanted us to set the timeframe. Now we’re fixing it and will get back to them by the end of the conference.”

He said he was confident Thailand would not be sanctioned.

“I have to say that all countries must help to solve the problem,” Theerapat said. “I insist that Thailand is merely a transit country. More effort is needed at the countries of origin and the end countries. We have to help each other to protect the elephant population. It’s the basic rule of supply and demand.”

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Links:
http://blog.africageographic.com/africa-geographic-blog/news/ivory-trade-nations-face-threat-of-sanctions/

http://asiancorrespondent.com/100675/ivory-trade-nations-face-threat-of-sanctions/

 

SHARK FINS: HUMAN INSANITY

Source: Sharkopedia

Text source: YouTube

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What Kind of Planet do you want to live on?

When any species has plummeted by 90%, 95%,96% or 99% surely we have a moral duty to protect the numbers that do remain, and help them to recover. Failing to do so is a damning indictment of our species, of our cultures, arrogance and indifference, and an utter betrayal of future generations, who won't have the joy of witnessing the intelligence and majesty of other animals, who have the evolutionary right to exist in their environment. There can be no greater example than the highly intelligent, great and majestic whales, so horrifyingly and savagely slaughtered.

The gap in nature is colossal, unfortunately, and that is just in the last 500 years. In those years, humans have been responsible for the biggest massacre of animals in a minuscule snippet of geological time, and in all of biological life, not through necessity, but through the pure greed of a minority.

How many species are no longer with us, other than stuffed specimens in museums?

What happened to the billions of Passenger Pigeons, almost as many Eskimo Curlews, the millions of Great Auks, the Stellars Sea Cow, the Caribbean Monk Seal, the Labrador Duck, the Thylacine, the White Gallinule, the Bluebuck, Burchells Zebre and the Quagga, the Caspian, Balinese and Javanese Tigers, and recently the Yangtze River Dolphin, the tragic and sad extirpation of too many species of wolves, the unfortunate Dodo, the Black Fronted and Carolina Parakeets, the Auckland Island Merganser, the Heath Hen, and thousands of other birds and species? They were obliterated.

They are all extinct, gone forever. It is shameful that we can be so reckless, so ignorant of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life on Earth. It is an absolute travesty that the majority are so indifferent to the 200 species going extinct every day, mostly through habitat destruction and utterly unsustainable avarice.

The impacts are accelerating humanity at an alarming pace to a point of uninhabitable ghastliness. And yet the majority are wallowing in a self-imposed denial when all of the consequences of this sadistic exploitation and violence are rapidly charging the dominant culture to self-annihilation.

But the deluded fantasies of limitless growth, production and consumption, completely conceals the destructive damage that are externalities. External to this grotesque economic system that puts zero value on Mother Nature. Services carried out by all ecosystems, in every biome, in the one priceless biosphere that ALL life has to live.

Yet even in the last fifty years a huge number of animals have perished at the hands of humanity, other Tigers, Lions, Leopards, 90% of the largest fish, Tibetan Antelope, all kinds of Bears, Elephants, Hippos, Turtles, Pangolins, and of course, the leviathans which have been profligately pillaged. Tragically this is just scratching the surface.

Once again the Ivory trade is booming, White Rhinos are being brutally butchered for their horns, and for nothing more than pseudo traditional medicinal claims. They are just the glamorous species.

Now it's the turn of Sharks to be plundered in their millions, just for a bowl of tasteless soup, a status symbol and over inflated egos, and they've been around 400 million years and evolved into over 400 species, stretching the very definition of what a shark is. For that they deserve admiration, not decimation.

Habitat destruction unfortunately wipes out species across all biomes. The sooner we realise that Homo sapiens (man, wise...really) do not own the domain of planet Earth, the better off the rest of life on Earth will be.

What I find incomprehensible and totally indefensible is the continued exploitation of animals, any animals, mainly for the whims of the fashion industry or so called traditional medicine, or cultural rights, the exponential growth of meat consumption or even worse, despicable 'trophy hunting'.

John Muir, the heroic naturalist said...

''everything is connected to everything else''.

It begs the question...

What will the consequences be of this egregious assault on the interconnectedness and interdependence of biological diversity?

If we do not change course, then we can guarantee that it will be a slow motion catastrophe.

Will humanity ever shake off the shackles of insanity?

A BIG thank you to Aljazeera English for reporting on so many environmental issues. A priceless contribution to conservation.

                                                              Uploaded by mettasutta67




Link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB6pej8GtqY