In the 1980s, over 600,000 elephants - more than half the total African pachyderm population - were destroyed for the hanko stamps so sought after by the Japanese. At the height of the slaughter, 70,000 a year were being killed. Kenya burned tons of confiscated ivory in 1989 in a gesture of defiance to the rest of the world.
The message?
The slaughter of the innocents and the ivory trade has to stop. The killing of whales and elephants constitute the twin arms of the crucifix of the greatest non- human genocide of our time. Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, even remarked that to save the elephant ‘is an urgent moral imperative’ and that this might well be our last chance to save them - and ourselves - from oblivion. If we lose the elephant, many other species will unravel, including ours.
Today thanks to the Chinese bloodlust for ivory trinkets and statuettes, and the demands of the Asian market, elephants are being decimated again. If this continues the world will see most of its elephant herds gone within 15 years. Civilisation may never be the same and the culture of elephants will be gone forever. Human children, raised on the stories of Dumbo and Babar, will never recover.
There is the ecological element to this story. The African forest elephant fertilises the Congo rainforest – the second largest (after the Amazon) on earth. Then there is the mythical component of a fellow being who has influenced our history, evolution and our very survival for millennia like no other creature has: we walked out of Africa following ages-old elephant migration paths.
But there is also the spiritual element, one that we were privy to thanks to the Samburu of Kenya whose tales are akin to the miraculous, stories that reconfirm our species on the level of mind and heart.
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