ANATOMY OF AN ELEPHANT HUNT
Seizure of ivory biggest in Canada in a decade
Two Ontario hunters could soon collect their trophy nearly five years after a Tanzanian safari. The taxidermist who organized the trip received a $5,000 fine Monday in Montreal for trying to import four elephant tusks without obtaining the required permit. A look back at the largest Canadian ivory seizure in a decade.
A $150,000 trip
Marek Sikorski and his son, Peter, killed one elephant each during their 2011 safari in Tanzania, a trip that cost some $150,000. A third of that cost went just to pay for the hunting permits. The two wealthy tourists, who are respectively the founder and the current president of Sikorski Sausages, a London, Ont., food company, wanted to bring back the ears, skin and tusks of the elephant, but the ivory was intercepted by customs officials when they arrived at the Montreal airport in April 2011. The taxidermist who organized this part of the package, Cyril D’Souza, had not obtained the necessary importation permits from Canadian authorities. His company, Out of Africa Taxidermy and Safari Operators, which is based in Mount Albert, Ont., pled guilty in the case Monday in Montreal.
Some hunting permitted
“It’s a technicality,” said Peter Sikorski when reached Monday by La Presse. He explained that the Tanzanian export permit was delivered before the arrival of the Canadian importation permit, which should not have happened. Even if the elephant is an endangered species — there are less than 500,000 in Africa and the number of elephants killed each year is greater than the number of births — hunting them is still permitted in certain countries.
“We do a lot of conservation activities over there,” Sikorski said, with- out expanding. “The legal hunt plays an important role in the protection of the animals . . . People need to get informed before passing judgment.”
Questions raised
Even legally, hunting elephants is “not ethical,” said Sheryl Sink, from the Canadian section of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. She says the concern is not only about their dwindling numbers.
“Elephants are very sociable animals and when you take away the adult males from the population it causes a great disruption in their family and their social group that we’re only starting to understand.”
Sink said that the act of hunting endangered animals, such as the elephant and the lion, is becoming less and less socially acceptable.
A rare seizure
The interception of four elephant tusks is “the first seizure of whole tusks in nearly 10 years” in Canada, said Natalie Huneault, a spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada in an email to La Presse. The ministry is responsible for applying the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Smaller quantities of ivory are seized several times a year, but “normally it is jewelry or small sculptures,” Huneault said.
$5,000 fine
D’Souza’s company was sentenced to pay a fine of $5,000 and has one year to obtain the required importation permits, without which the state will keep the elephant tusks.
“It’s a judgment that takes into consideration the participation of the accused in this incident,” said Crown prosecutor Philippe Viau-Dupuis. The maximum penalty in such a case is $50,000, but Viau-Dupuis noted that the case was not about illegal poaching.
The animals were killed in a legal hunt. If D’Souza’s company makes a request for the importation permits required, it is expected to receive them.
Loss of value
The conclusion of this case comes as global efforts to eliminate the trade in illegal ivory are starting to bear fruit.
“We see the price of ivory dropping,” the secretary general of CITES, John Scanlon, said Monday in the sidelines of a summit in Switzerland dedicated to the illegal trade in animals.
The organization Save the Elephants, based in Kenya, reported in December that the price for rough ivory in China, where steps to reduce the legal and illegal trade in ivory have recently been instituted, have cut the price of ivory in half in the last 18 months, dropping from $2,900 per kilogram to $1,500 per kilogram.