SA’s precious jumbos in great peril
DR PAULA Kahumbu’s eyes widen in alarm. She has just heard that about 30 elephants have already been slaughtered in the Kruger National Park this year.
Compared with the estimated 100 elephants slain every day for their tusks in other parts of the continent, the toll may appear small.
But thinking this way is a mistake, warns the acclaimed Kenyan conservationist, whose own government realised just how deadly downplaying the unfolding elephant poaching crisis can be.
“When you don’t nip these things in the bud, you allow these criminal cartels to strengthen in your country, to corrupt your police, your wildlife authorities, your ports and your borders.
“You’re creating an economic crisis for the country, undermining your security. And these guys are not just trading in ivory, but in drugs, in people and in guns. Often, I think, what’s in their heads is ‘let’s test the waters over here. If nothing happens, we will go there in a big way’.”
Kahumbu, the chief executive of the pioneering Kenyan conservation charity WildifeDirect, would know. She tells how after the 2008 legal ivory sale, which was meant to curb poaching, more and more elephants were felled in Kenya, their renewed slaughter fuelled by high prices for “white gold” in Asia.
By 2012, a period she remembers as “dark years” for Kenya’s elephants, poaching had skyrocketed. “We reached 384 poached elephants that year. We failed to nip it in the bud because of complacency, denial and embarrassment. As conservationists, we declared a national disaster, but the government was not happy.”
Still, Kahumbu, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer who has won multiple awards for her conservation work, and her conservation colleagues demanded that the government take action.
By ramping up law enforcement, elephant poaching levels in Kenya have fallen to about 30 to 40 animals a year. The country, however, remains the major transit point for illegal ivory shipped out of the continental killing fields, smuggled primarily to China. There, ivory, which has been used for thousands of years, is prized as an exotic status symbol among the country’s nouveau riche and a lucrative investment for those banking on the species’ extinction.
Kahumbu, a Princeton University graduate, who was raised on a farm teeming with wildlife on the edges of Nairobi, has spent a lifetime championing the iconic animals. Today, she is regarded as one of Africa’s foremost elephant conservationists. Coincidentally, as a child her neighbour was renowned conservationist the Richard Leakey, who famously halted Kenya’s poaching onslaught in the 1980s, and who created WildlifeDirect.
“I wanted to save animals, and elephants to me are the ultimate animal that represents all animals,” says Kahumbu.
With an African elephant killed every 15 minutes on the continent, they could be extinct in a decade. Their once-large populations are “blinking out”, she says. “I think what we’ll end up with, if poaching continues, is little islands of elephants left. We already have the example of rhinos in South Africa.”
That South Africa, along with neighbours Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia, have petitioned global wildlife authorities to sell ivory stockpiles, is “selfish”, says Kahumbu. Instead, she said, SA should burn its ivory stockpiles, as Kenya has done.
That criminal cartels have set their sights on the Kruger is worrying. “Kruger has the best defences on the continent. What’s going on when elephant poachers can come in and kill 30 elephants you know about but it’s probably 10 times that? When you shoot elephants it sends out messages to all the elephants who are now tense and stressed.”
And too little is known about the complex criminal cartels fuelling elephant poaching, she says. “My biggest regret is our scattered approach (as conservationists). The criminals are laughing all the way. They’ve not been caught or punished. Every now and then, there’s a seizure, but there are many others in the pipeline already.”