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Headline : World Elephant Day - 12th Aug
Caption : Trunk Calling - World Elephant Day

August 12th is world elephant day: guide, photographer and presenter Paul Goldstein gives his sober thoughts on these persecuted mammals, along with a gallery of his elephant pictures.

"Love affairs with threatened species will not save them, pragmatism and a growing number of saintly protectors will. It will also be assisted if governments bother to listen.

I saw and photographed my first wild elephant in 1984, a monstrous Tsavo West tusker that was scratching its haunch against a fallen acacia. This was in the middle of a rampant poaching period and I have no idea if this old bull survived. The experience left an indelible impression on me and since then I have spent months with them all over Africa and indeed elsewhere having now photographed them in a dozen different countries. Whether they are feeding, bathing or performing intricate family rituals, they fascinate and enchant me as they do many, yet they are still desperately endangered.

It is simple mathematics, there are only about 400,000 elephants left on the planet. In 2016 approximately 50,000 were poached, their butchered carcasses littering the African continent. It is predominately China and Vietnam that shoulder the moral burden as it is their burgeoning middle classes that purchase ‘must-buy’ ivory trinkets. They are equally in the moral dock for the abuse of rhino horn, tiger pelts and pangolin scales, the abuse underwritten by their totally unproven traditional medicine. Elephant ivory is even used for setting papal seals in the Vatican for God’s sake!

As well as the abuse of body parts the rank and familiar stench of corruption also adds to this animal’s decline. In Namibia, the hardy desert elephant, despite claims, probably only has a couple of hundred members and ekes out an existence in desperately harsh conditions. Each year the government grants five licenses to shoot breeding bulls to ‘brave’ hunters. They have their noses so far in the murky trough that they cannot see beyond their pockets at the wanton destruction they are causing, as hunters from the US, Germany and South Africa pay a princely sum for the ‘privilege’ of killing these animals. In Central Africa poaching often feeds the markets and bazaars in Sudan where Chinese buyers (the Chinese own half of the continent now) pick up these questionable artefacts. As National Geographic reported several years ago, much of the profits go to fund ghoulish fundamental groups like the Janjaweed.

Botswana has the majority of elephants and in May lifted the ban on trophy hunting, a supposed pragmatic solution to their over-population, but in real terms a cordial and embossed invitation to the poachers.

Within all this pessimism there are always heroes, generally in the form of the impossibly brave and resolute anti-poaching units. They do their heroic work whilst under-funded and under-armed, combatting the vicious disease of poaching.

Even in the UK it is still possible to purchase ‘antique’ ivory, an absurd loophole that needs closing. Fast.

Anyone who has been on safari will remember their first elephant with a fondness approaching evangelical levels. It is a species perhaps more iconic than any and has spawned a thousand books, films and cartoons, yet once the herds have been plundered and their tusks purloined who is going to tell the politicians they were negligent, who has the teeth to take on the Chinese, who has the courage. Can elephants survive, of course they can, but it will need some attentive ears to those saints who are currently protecting their dwindling numbers.”



Paul Goldstein guides for Exodus travels (www.exodus.co.uk) and co-owns Kicheche Camps (www.kicheche.com) in Kenya.
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