According to all the reliable reports from competent news agencies, there is a criminal conspiracy linking buyers of ivory in China and Japan to bushmen in Africa and southern Asia. This empire of illegal poaching is run by criminals who are engaged in exterminating elephants for their ivory.
The kingpins in the poaching cartels are just as guilty as the bushmen they hire to kill the elephants. There has been a lot of “double talk” by involved parties in China and Japan about stopping the slaughter of elephants, but the killing goes on.
Delusional oriental beliefs have made it next to impossible for anyone to deal successfully with the poaching crimes of the Chinese and Japanese people. Persistent and faulty age-old beliefs are preventing any progress to be made in saving elephants. When people believe tiger bones and rhino horns are endowed with powers of magic, and when people believe they have the right to decimate whole herds of elephants just to provide them with ivory to make completely useless trinkets and artifacts, new methods are going to have to be used to prevent crimes against nature.
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It would take too long to “reeducate” the poachers about protecting the environment and conserving wildlife. The elephants are running out of time. All the grizzly facts about the senseless extermination of elephants can be read by people all over the world. While the killing goes on day and night, too many people are only apathetically looking on without doing anything to stop it.
The people who are trying to protect elephants are going to have to take a much tougher role against poachers. Stopping the demand for ivory will require substituting ivory with other materials and holding the poachers accountable for their crimes.
An alternative option for saving elephants and other endangered animals is to relocate them to safe preserves here in America. This plan of saving animals by relocation has been done with many smaller animals such as lemurs and monkeys, and it would also work with large animals.
Future generations of people should have the right to see and know elephants and other wild animals in a safe and natural habitat. It is up to the people who are trying to protect wild animals to stand up to the poachers and take direct and positive action against them!
--Marlin O. Wallace |