We’ve always thought of it as paradise: a handmade house, fashioned from driftwood and boulders on the banks of Kenya’s Athi River, where fish eagles soar on the thermals and hippos cavort in the shallows.
But returning there last week, we found our friends deeply troubled. They’d just come across a dead elephant on their land, a poisoned arrow embedded in its hide. Determined to deny the poachers their prize, they removed the tusks and hid them before alerting the Kenya Wildlife Service.
Traditionally Kenya has been regarded as one of the good guys in the war against poaching, which threatened to wipe out the African elephant in the 1980s. It led the movement that produced a global ban on ivory trading in 1989 and periodically organises spectacular bonfires of tusks that are confiscated from poachers or from elephants that die naturally.
So why is poaching one of the three subjects all Kenyans are talking about (along with the famine and political corruption)? Why has the number of elephants being killed illegally quadrupled in two years? Last month a thousand tusks were found on the island of Zanzibar, concealed in a container of anchovies.
Poaching never stopped but it has taken off again with a vengeance since the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species agreed in 2008 to a second “one-off” sale of stockpiled ivory, arguing that this would deter poaching by satisfying the demand for ivory. The opposite has happened. It sent the disastrous message that ivory is available and legal.
Most goes to China where a rapidly growing middle class, craves ivory trinkets. In Kenya we constantly encountered road building projects, each overseen by a Chinese engineer with clipboard and hard hat. China is investing in huge infrastructure projects all over East Africa, in return for timber and mineral rights. KWS is overstretched and there are suggestions that the authorities are turning a blind eye to some ivory smuggling. The thousands of Chinese settling in the region provide a ready supply of middlemen.
Then there is the preponderance of young African men with no visible means of support beyond their guns. The illegal trade is also funding Islamic extremism. (Many poachers are Somalis.) Even without them, in an economy where the tusks of a bull elephant are worth 15 times more than the annual salary of a subsistence farmer, the temptations are obvious.
Yet Africa without this charismatic pachyderm is unimaginable. They are the flagship for Kenyan wildlife tourism, which employs 160,000 and is worth $1bn a year to the economy. No elephants. No tourists.
There is hope. DNA technology will soon enable an investigator to link a piece of illegal ivory with the animal it came from. Recent experience has illustrated definitively that a complete ivory trade ban is essential. (Shamefully, Britain supported the last stockpile sale proposal in 2010.)
Many Chinese believe ivory, like teeth, can be extracted without killing the elephant. The bloody truth might cure their yen for it. Also African governments could be obliging the Chinese to crack down on ivory sales and invest in conservation in Africa in return for trade deals.
Finally, the profits from wildlife tourism must be better shared with local people, to give them an incentive for keeping game alive. That is the model that has been successfully implemented at privately-owned Lewa Downs, where Wills popped the question to Kate. That’s where we ate breakfast while a family group of a dozen elephants cheerfully dismantled a dead tree fewer than 30 yards away. For an hour we watched and snapped away as the matriarch gently chided the turbulent toddlers and two young bulls played tag. Magical. Though their numbers at Lewa have actually increased, elephants are naturally migratory and cannot be contained in fenced parks. That’s why Ian Craig, owner of Lewa, and others are turning their attention to working with local communities to protect these massive herbivores throughout their natural rangelands.
Global outrage halted the “ivory wars” of the 20th century. Can it be mobilised again to stop the latest butchery?
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