News: why hippos are victims of the ivory trade
Hippos’ teeth are more sought after than you might think
Think for a moment about animals threatened by the trade in their products – what comes to mind? Elephants and rhinos, first, I would guess, then anything from tigers and pangolins to sharks and seahorses. But hippos? I doubt it.
Let’s be honest, your first thought is that cavernous yawn revealing a pair of incisors sticking out from the gaping mouth like stumpy stalagmites. That, and possibly the baseless claim that hippos kill more people than any other vertebrate species in Africa.
But focus on those teeth again: they might appear to be over-the-top weaponry for a strict herbivore, but to a poor African, they can easily represent something else – money. Once it’s carved, most people would be unable to distinguish between ivory from a hippo and ivory from an elephant.
Even the largest hippo teeth do not come close in size to a fully-grown elephant’s tusk, of course, and so hippos have generally been an afterthought when it comes to the ivory trade, according to Rebecca Lewison, co-chair of the IUCN’s
Hippo Specialist Group and associate professor at San Diego State University.
And that’s part of the problem. “They’re an afterthought on every front,” Lewison says. “We’re so worried about rhinos and elephants, we just don’t have the same awareness of this as a conservation issue.” But we should do. Yes, African elephants are threatened by the ivory trade, but there are still some 400,000 spread across the continent, while the most recent estimate for the common (as opposed to pygmy) hippo is a population of 115,000–130,000 in its sub-Saharan range.
“It’s worth emphasising,” says Mark Jones, policy director at the Born Free Foundation, “that this is less than a third of the number of elephants remaining across the continent.”
As habitat is lost and fragmented, numbers are declining, too. According to the wildlife trade monitoring group, Traffic, the population has plummeted by up to nearly 30 per cent since the mid-1990s.
No one knows if the decrease in hippo numbers is down to poaching for the ivory trade or other factors, but Traffic reported in 2004 that data from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and customs records ‘appeared to show an increase in international trade in hippo ivory after the ban on international trade in elephant ivory took effect in 1990.’ In the early 2000s, hippo numbers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo crashed by an estimated 95 per cent, but this was during a time of serious civil unrest, and there are question marks over whether the ivory trade was to blame. “I think it had a lot to do with people being really hungry – hippos are a fantastic source of food and easy to kill,” says Lewison. “You have to get them out of the water, but they can provide up to 1,400kg of meat.”
We know there is a large legal trade in hippo ivory, however – records show that 90 per cent of all exported hippo ivory was sent to Hong Kong between 1975 and 2016. Of this, 75 per cent came from Tanzania and Uganda, representing nearly 100,000 hippos. It’s hard to imagine this isn’t having an impact on overall numbers, but there is no conclusive evidence.
According to a study carried out by researchers at the University of Hong Kong, 90 per cent of the global hippo ivory trade is sent into Hong Kong, where the items are carved into trinkets and other items. It’s also still legal to import elephant ivory into
Most people would be unable to distinguish between ivory from a hippo and an elephant.
Hong Kong, but this avenue will be shut off in 2021. What will the carvers do then – will they, as some people fear, resort to importing even more hippo ivory?
This is why the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and others are pushing for hippo ivory to be put on a par with that of elephants. The UK Ivory Act, which was passed last year, is due to come into force at the end of 2019, but at present only extends to ivory from elephants. At the end of August, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) finished a consultation on extending this ban to hippos, but also walruses, narwhals and even mammoths.
That would make it illegal to sell ivory from any of these species within the UK, but, says IFAW’s head of policy and campaigns David Cowdrey, it would have another effect, too. “For us, it’s about setting a global precedent,” he says. The UK’s ivory legislation, he adds, is the best in the world, but it’s important to make sure it’s as comprehensive as possible.
“I think a UK ban on hippo ivory sales would be fantastic, but the effectiveness of this policy on the conservation of hippos depends on the entire planet, not just one country,” says Luke Gibson, associate professor at the University of Hong Kong and one of the authors of the research cited earlier. Close down one market, he points out, and the trade will just shift elsewhere.
Indeed, Gibson suspects that this is what happened when China enacted its own ivory
ban in 2017, leading to more elephant ivory going to Hong Kong. But, overall, the UK is going in the right direction. “It’s a needed first step towards a global, co-ordinated end to this unsustainable trade,” he says.
There are a number of reasons why we should be more concerned about hippos than we are. For a start, they are more constrained in their habitat requirements than either elephants or rhinos. “They rely on the worst thing possible,” says Lewison. “Fresh water. Everything needs fresh water, and we are constantly diverting it.”
Their need to spend much of the day in water also means they are unable to migrate easily away from trouble, whether it be poaching, other forms of conflict with humans, or habitat loss or degradation.
Added to this, hippos are hard to study. You can’t fly over and count them during the day (as you can with elephants) because they may be submerged, and they are hard to fit with a radio collar (“You can’t collar them, they don’t have necks,” says Lewison). Finally, hippos are ecosystem engineers – their dung fertilises rivers and boosts fish stocks, while they act as giant lawnmowers on land, modifying the habitat for other species. Is there a reason we don’t care about hippos? They don’t have the charm or sophisticated social intelligence of elephants, and unlike rhinos somehow they haven’t captivated the world’s attention. Hippos are not even naturally aggressive animals, argues Lewison, despite that ‘most dangerous in Africa’ tag. As with many species, they may become so when put under pressure from humans, and they do raid crops where the opportunity presents itself.
But, I counter, surely to most people they are not aesthetically pleasing – in fact, they’re downright ugly. “I think they are lovely,” retorts Lewison. “Okay, they don’t appear to have the same rich tapestry of behavioural repertoire that you see with elephants and they look and act like big cows, but they are beautiful in their own way.” It would be hard to argue with that – so spare a thought for the chuntering, grunting, groaning, roaring river horse, as it needs all the help it can get.
“They look and act like big cows, but they are beautiful in their own way.”