A Comprehensive & Passionate US Article on Elephant Poaching

[Mel]

For the leadership of Western nations, surely the key is this: Because so many wicked causes are today served by killing elephants, exactly that many good causes are served by helping them. The only upside to being a magnet for every devil in Africa is that it gives the rest of the world, if we are all thinking straight, a powerful incentive to come to your defense, even at this late hour.

Elephants are a "keystone" species, as the ecologists say, a giant force in nature whose fortunes affect everything around them for good or ill, and it turns out something similar is true of their place in the security environment. When we help them, we help so many others who suffer at the same hands. When we and our allies help troubled states to protect elephants, we're making them more stable nations, better able to protect themselves from other threats as well. And when, in the case of the central states, armies of thugs, rapists, human traffickers, and terrorists including a cell of al-Qaeda, are getting their money from the extermination of the elephants and the sale of ivory, it is in our urgent interest to stop them, and bring an end to the whole filthy business.

"We can beat the poachers," a senior ranger in Gabon named Joseph Okouyi told the London Daily Mail, "but we have to end the demand in China and we need better logistics with more camps, more planes, more boats." Some Western policymakers, pressed by other concerns, may still view it all as hopeless, because the corruption runs so deep, the lines of force seem to favor the enemy, and, it is said, market demand will always find a way. But if Okouyi, a man facing fierce battle with the worst of the worst in Africa, believes the cause isn't lost, then who are politicians and diplomats to say otherwise?

[Mel]

The relevant diplomats work their various purposes through the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES. This Geneva-based organization consists of 178 nations, the "Parties," that are legally bound to its rules, or, at least, obliged to honor "requests" and "recommendations" to please observe those rules. It regulates wildlife-related commerce among nations, according to the "appendix" status assigned to each listed species. Whenever you read about elephants and ivory, CITES will be somewhere in the story.

In practice, CITES operates a lot like the UN itself at its most helpless, so that the principal offenders have equal voice and everybody else, to conduct any business at all, has to pretend that one and all are in sincere pursuit of the same lofty objectives. CITES proceeds, no matter what the crisis, at the pace of international officialdom: Appeals are made to the Parties to develop and implement action plans for the further study of agenda items that are in due course submitted to the Standing Committee for prompt referral to the Plenary and forwarding for review to the Secretariat, and then everyone calls it a day. The group convened not long ago in Bangkok. Shruti Suresh of the Environmental Investigative Agency, a British NGO, gives a nice summary of how things went: "Gripping speeches were delivered about the elephant poaching crisis ... 'organised crime' and the need for 'time-bound measurable action' to stop the killing and the illegal trade in ivory. ... Throughout the proceedings, there was one word that was avoided like the plague by the Parties -- 'China.'"

It can all get very involved, but the upshot is this. CITES in 1989 transferred the African elephant from Appendix II to Appendix I. Appendix I, if you're fauna and people are trying to kill you, is where you want to be -- protected. Asian elephants landed there in 1975, and though they've had their share of misfortune, on the commercial-trade front this status did them a lot of good.

To see the difference that Appendix I could make, one had only look at their "de-listed" kin in African from 1975 to 1989, doomed on more than one occasion by CITES itself. For a time, in the 1980's, this organization and the man who ran it were prime movers in the mass hunting and culling of elephants. In South Africa and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of the creatures were wiped out, in scenes you could set beside last year's Cameroon slaughter of hundreds by the Janjaweed without knowing the difference.

The secretary general in that era was Eugene Lapointe, a puzzling figure in the realm of wildlife protection who made a quick exit in 1989 after Time revealed his close connections to the Japanese Ivory Association. Lapointe then devoted himself -- again in collaboration with Japanese interests -- to the cause of delisting both elephants and whales back to lowly Appendix II, so that still more could be hunted without onerous obstacles like "endangered" and "near-extinct" status getting in the way. He seems to have it in for the "charismatic mega-fauna" in particular, as if the special regard and empathy that people feel for these animals makes it only more urgent that they be destroyed. I interviewed Lapointe once, in 2000, and still remember the utter disdain with which he brushed off the "sentimentality" of protection efforts: all this "propaganda about elephants -- elephants being shot and the calf nearby making noises and so forth. ... It's for their own good, to be hunted and used" -- a rule " suffering no exceptions." He is the only man I have ever met who spoke with hatred for elephants. And this is the guy who ran CITES for nine years.

[Mel]

The Stalinesque stewardship of Lapointe prepared the way for the great reprieve of 1990. The mass slaughter was so god-awful as to rate, in June of 1989, the presidential intervention of George Bush, who unilaterally banned ivory imports into the United States -- because otherwise, he said, "the wild elephant will soon be lost from this earth." Within a week Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did the same in the United Kingdom, setting in motion an international ban by CITES that took effect in January. It was still legal to sell existing, worked ivory domestically, but you had to be careful, and the ban was such a big deal that every prospective ivory buyer, high-end merchant, and pawn-shop owner in the civilized world understood that new ivory was forbidden, tainted, and its sale or purchase a punishable offense. Demand was almost gone, enough for elephant populations to stabilize. There was carnage but not mayhem, which in the elephant world is progress.
Then, in 2008, at the initiative chiefly of delegates from China and Japan, CITES approved a "one-off" sale of ivory from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Some 102 tons of tusks, taken from smugglers or from cullings, was just stacked there in guarded warehouses, and why let it all go to waste? President Mugabe, enforcing his credo that elephants must "pay their own way" with ivory and trophies, was a big player in all of this. In 1999, at the tyrant's insistence, there had been a one-off ivory sale of fifty tons to Japan as an "experiment." Since 2008, other nations including Zimbabwe have received the go-ahead for one-off sales. You have to be burrowed deep into the bureaucratic workings of CITES, as each new sale in turn is authorized, not to look up and wonder why everyone still calls them "one-off."

The theory in 2008 was that ivory from elephants already killed would satiate demand, drive down prices, and thereby afford a buffer to elephants still alive. It overlooked a few problems, and the most fatal blunder, as Bryan Christy notes in National Geographic, was a failure to see the difference between "experimenting" in Japan, foolish as that was, and inviting a great reawakening of demand in China -- a country with 14 international borders, thousands of miles of coastline, 10 times the population of Japan, and the world's fastest-growing economy.

With the CITES secretary general himself overseeing the auction of tusks, it was one of those news-in-brief items out of Africa that nobody even remembers when the full catastrophe unfolds, and the understandable reaction today is to wonder, "Wasn't ivory banned years ago?" Suddenly it was for sale again, and who was to say whether the goods were new or old?

On top of that, state enterprises in China promptly rigged the market. In the auctions, they acquired the raw ivory at artificially low prices (aided, as Dr. Meng Xianlin, China's lead delegate to CITES, confessed recently to Bryan Christy, by collusion between Japanese and Chinese bidders). Now they sell it at artificially high prices, parceling out five tons a year while restricting buyers to Chinese carving factories. So the "legal" stuff is twice the value of what the black-market stuff was in 2008. And the black-market stuff is cheaper than the licit stuff. The combined efforts of Chinese "businessmen" in the African hinterlands, village riff-raff, bought border guards, faithless politicians, warlords, wildlife traffickers, terrorists, and criminal gangs can offer buyers a better deal than Beijing's monopoly will offer, thus inviting the poaching frenzy. To add one further absurdity to this dynamic: even as the newly prosperous of China buy ivory products to strut their affluence, everybody involved is still trying to shave a few yuan off the price tag.

Chinese authorities do, on occasion, catch smugglers, and one needn't always assume the worst about them. An ad campaign by WildAid and Save the Elephants is underway in China, with the former Houston Rockets basketball star Yao Ming as spokesman. "An ivory carving is thousands of miles removed from the sad carcass of a poached elephant," writes Ming, "but we need to make that connection. . . . Would anyone buy ivory if they had witnessed this?" It's a tough sell to people who still haven't made a lot of other connections: a land of 1.3 billion that still has no anti-cruelty laws, tolerates the pitiless confinement Asiatic bears farmed for their bile, shows little sentiment for victims caught up in the dog-meat trade, regards the consumption of wildlife, caught or farmed, as normal, and besides all that is ruled by a government that's pretty rough with its own people when they step out of line. Yet there are also the stirrings of a humane movement in China, with younger citizens like Yao Ming showing the way, and what an excellent use for this man to make of his own new wealth and stature.

When Chinese authorities confiscate the raw ivory, in any event, even that gets dumped into the market in sales at a profit to domestic traders. It hasn't occurred to whatever People's Committee decided this policy that the arrangement only makes the smugglers, in effect, ivory couriers working for the government of China. Every last carver and collector, moreover, protests that he or she deals only in legal material predating the worldwide ban. New ivory, fresh off the range states, gets laundered with phony documents. Forging "pre-ban" certificates has become an esteemed craft all by itself. "Like the forest canopy that protects poachers from detection," writes Levin in the Times, "the regulated ivory trade has provided unscrupulous Chinese carvers and collectors with the ideal legal camouflage to buy and sell contraband tusks."

Leaving aside the question of whether, at this point, there is any such thing as a scrupulous ivory dealer, what matters is that there be no dealers at all. As long as any ivory can be legally bought or sold, resourceful people will keep the new stuff coming and palm it off as legitimate. A master carver named Zhou Bai, interviewed by Levin, states the matter plainly, although of course he thinks it's all just wonderful. "'When the ban was passed ... I was sad this art would die with me,' said Zhou, who was busy turning a three-foot-long tusk into a fanciful temple surrounded by clouds. 'But now we have the opportunity to keep it alive.'"
Only vanity at its most self-absorbed could sacrifice an elephant for an ivory temple, trading so perfect a creature for a little idol of one's own making -- in Zhou's case, a piece only more pathetic for its supposedly pious inspiration. But the man's got one thing right: Either the art dies, or the elephants die. And, though the master would have it otherwise, most of us would prefer a farewell to the art.

[Mel]

"The alarm bells are ringing," as Kenya's Julius Kipng'etich told the Telegraph. "We will tell CITES: 'Look what you have triggered with your one-off sales. You must ban the ivory trade." Of course he is right, only this time the ban must be unequivocal, all-encompassing, and permanent. There must be no such thing -- anywhere, and starting in America -- as the legal sale of ivory. A rule of thumb regarding all the world's ivory would be to leave it where it is, above all if it is still in the jaws of an elephant, and in the case of stockpiled tusks to follow the example of Kenya after the first ban and of Gabon just last year: Burn it all.

"In the middle of this field was this huge pile of ivory tusks all stacked up on a pyre," as one observer described the moment in Libreville, where Gabon President Ali Bongo put the match to it himself. "It's sending up a torch or beacon to the rest of the world." That is how serious people dispose of serious threats, at no more loss to Gabon or to mankind than a ton of cocaine heaped into the incinerator, and what a contrast to CITES with its ivory auctioneering, appeasement, and consistent refusal to make the one "recommendation" that would really matter: restrictions on the trading privileges of every offender.

If we can assume anything about Chinese authorities, national and local, it is that when the orders from Beijing are unequivocal, they know how to police a situation. And assured access to each others' markets is the very incentive built into CITES' original design - the instrument of its authority, if it has any at all. The prospect of sanctions came up the last time around, when, as the Bangkok Post recounts, the conference identified three African nations.

Along with transit countries Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and top markets China and Thailand - as making insufficient efforts to curb the trade. But they avoided punishment after six of them submitted draft action plans in response and China and Tanzania committed to do so by a specific date. ... CITES general secretary John Scanlon said such measures were a "last resort" and should only be imposed "where there's a clear failure to comply and no intention to comply."
Give them some dashed-off paper or "draft action plan" at CITES and it buys you another year. Why would these chronic offenders themselves even be asked to do the drafting and planning? Isn't that what the whole organization and treaty are for? Aren't "intention" and performance usually related, so that after years of the same results the intention may be surmised from the non-compliance? And with another ninety or more elephants hitting the dust every day, isn't this exactly the time for a "last resort"?

What is happening now to entire herds is just the final onslaught, brought on as much by irresolute people of good intent as by corrupt people of evil intent, a story these poor creatures are hardly the first to play out. "A plaint of guiltless hurt doth pierce the sky," and the Standing Committee is still waiting on first drafts of a plan to do anything about it.

[Mel]

As an extension of the UN, CITES would have, one would think, some sway in New York. Yet in Bangkok, when somebody had the half-decent idea of taking the problem of poaching by terrorists before the UN Security Council, that didn't get far either. They won't even use what little influence they have. As for the organization's credibility, that moved fast when the bidding started.

To turns things around now will take bigger forces. It will take real power, decisions that count, laws with force, and an audience that listens. So ask yourself this, especially if you're a proud environmentalist and voted last November for the candidate who said he is too: If America, 24 years ago, could take the lead under a Republican president, why can't we do it again now under a Democratic president?

It's hard for anyone, much less for a president, to think fresh about a problem so perennial and unpleasant, to clear the mind of the tawdry particulars and find a straight path to what is ultimately a fairly simple objective. But to give it a try, start with Japan.

Often in the ivory debate, when it comes to solutions, it is said that we just have to "put pressure on China," as if this were an uncomplicated proposition. Yet how are American diplomats to prevail on China, a creditor of the United States and at times a rival, to cooperate in this effort when our closest ally in the region is, basically, one of the bad actors?

Like Thailand and other friends, Japan has become a gateway for the trafficking in wildlife of every variety, living and dead, "from turtles to tigers" as Scientific American puts it. Demand for "traditional East Asian remedies" is clearing Africa of animal life, all to feed nothing but the delusions of people who are certain that bear claws will ease their arthritis, expect lion viscera to solve their impotence, or -- in the delicate phrasing of our state department -- believe "unsubstantiated claims of the rhino horn as a cure for cancer." Secretary Clinton detailed trafficking issues in a speech last year, and in just about every case -- the whole pillaging of Africa, to say nothing of Japan's slaughter of dolphins and willful, deceitful hunting of whales even as we and other nations seek to protect those creatures -- Japanese authorities figure prominently in the problem.

America itself was once the world's largest market for ivory, and we still have a busy retail market for it that goes casually policed. Yet for nearly a quarter century, we have at least sought to make amends by pursuing the honorable and unselfish objective of curtailing ivory and sparing the African elephant from extinction. Ultimately, there's nothing in it for us. It's just one of things we do for its own sake, and happily most our friends in the world feel the same. We can't count on Japan to help us? Why, time after time in these matters, are they lining up with China instead of with America?

You could counter that Japan is a vital ally in a dangerous region -- North Korea over here, China over there, and a general situation we're all aware of -- and so we have much bigger things to worry about in our dealings with them than their complicity in the undoing of the world's wildlife. But why doesn't that same point work in reverse -- that the government of Japan has much bigger business with us, and therefore should not constantly work to cross purposes in matters that we, at least, think important enough to put a lot on the line for? All the more because China is a strategic concern, and America the nation that to this day underwrites the security of the Island of Japan, it would not seem to be asking too much that Japanese leaders help us in a benign and, by the standards of high diplomacy, fairly innocuous matter like keeping ivory off the market and holding the line at CITES.

It is surely a rule of diplomacy that before you approach a great power with which you have a difference, you've got to know your friends are with you. And at the next opportunity, Secretary Kerry would be within his rights to say that he and the president who sent him expect that of Japan going forward. They need to trust us on this one, as do Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and every other friendly or dependent government in the Asia-Pacific region, and more "promising steps" such as Secretary Clinton noted last November aren't going to cut it. Her team, she said, had "met with African and Asian leaders to discuss the immediate actions needed to thwart poachers," and "next week, President Obama and I will personally bring this message to our partners in ASEAN and the East Asia Summit." Doubtless they did. But the message doesn't seem to have taken, because in Bangkok a few months later there was not the least sign of unity. In what passes for drama at CITES, Thailand's Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, declared that she would consider reforming Thai law to regulate the ivory trade, in terms to be defined on some unspecified future date.

In the most emphatic, precise language -- no more "urging" and "calling on" them -- all of these governments need to hear that this cause really matters to our country, and regardless of Asian traditions surrounding ivory, the American government will be counting on their support on every front to end the ivory trade. "How shockingly destructive and historically shameful it would be," Secretary Kerry said last year, "if we did nothing while a great species was criminally slaughtered into extinction." Tell them that and more, until they understand that the use of ivory, like foot-binding and other ignoble traditions mercifully abandoned, has to end. They are great and advanced nations; now, in the treatment of animals, they need to start acting like civilized nations, and so, in other respects, do we.
Let the elephants be a "keystone" here, too, the focal point of a larger effort. Cast a wide, strong net for ivory dealers throughout Asia, and all kinds of other miscreants will be dragged in as well, including traffickers in weapons and narcotics. Relentless policing of smugglers; grave penalties for offenses; fast-lane prosecution of any official abetting the trade; a shutdown of domestic retail markets found with ivory, down to the smallest curio shop; widely aired ad campaigns in their countries, like that of Yao Ming in China, to show the real cost of ivory; and votes at CITES and at the UN consistent with all of this: These verifiable, immediate steps by our friends across the Asia-Pacific region should be taken as the signs of cooperation, no vague assurances or "draft action plans" accepted in their place.

[Mel]

I once had the experience of being in Adelaide, Australia, watching our American delegation to the International Whaling Commission -- basically, the CITES for whales -- contending for days with Japanese delegates, unsuccessfully, to get any slight concession on the hunting of whales. In theory our delegation represents the views and wishes of the president of the United States, who appoints its chief delegate, but at far-off conferences, against the harangues of tireless, troublesome adversaries, those views and wishes lose a good deal of their force. A few years later, as it turned out, I found myself in the West Wing of the White House when the subject of whaling by Japan and Norway happened to come up, and a figure of some influence around there remarked, "There is no reason why anyone in the year 2003 needs to be killing whales," going on to explain why that was so. Such clarity, the best instincts of those at the top, could save our diplomats a lot of trouble on the whaling issue, and it's the same with the fate of the elephants.

As a speechwriter, I also traveled with President George W. Bush to Japan, South Korea, and China, as well as to Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, and Nigeria. And I noticed something that's probably similar in the Obama years as well. The policy aides all cared about wildlife issues, and ivory in particular, but they acted, even during these travels, on the assumption that none it was really vital enough to rate direct presidential attention. It all got sorted out at lower levels, leaving foreign counterparts to draw logical conclusions about its importance to us, and, by neglect, perhaps hastening the unraveling of conditions in Africa.

It's just possible that these things keep unraveling exactly because they are not handled at the top. And who is better suited to take on the crisis? It's hard to believe that an American president with a solid environmentalist constituency, a foreign-policy emphasis on Asia and Africa, some boyhood years spent in Southeast Asia (at Jakarta's St. Francis of Assisi School), and doubtless an abhorrence for cruelty of any kind, would not have convictions and practical ideas of his own about how to avoid such vast suffering among the people and creatures in the land of his father's birth.

[Mel]

In Dreams from My Father, the president recalled how his Kenyan sister, when he first went to that country in the late 1980s, "grimaced and shook her head" when he expressed a desire to see the wildlife parks. She viewed them as a vestige of colonial days, an indulgence for white tourists who came to the continent to photograph the animals without noticing much else: "These wazunga care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children." Obama told her "she was letting other people's attitudes prevent her from seeing her own country," and the book has some lovely passages recalling his first glimpses of wild Africa -- "what Creation looked like." All of this, to complete the picture, in the company of a tour guide named Francis.

An answer to the anti-colonial point is that, whatever else is to be said of elephants and their claims of space, the very last influence they should be associated with are the imperial cultures of past times. Africa's people and elephants have shared nothing if not common tormentors -- the gangs and traffickers of today, the slave traders who once provided most of the ivory in Europe and America, and so on just about all the way back to the Roman era. A quarter-century after the president's journey, moreover, their population stands at a third or less of what it was then. It's a difference of about a million dead elephants, and even the poorest Africans seem to take a lenient view. As Julie Owona of Cameroon writes at Al Jazeera: "with the disappearance of elephants, the continent is losing a part of its soul."

What America can do to help is, in any event, for Barack Obama to decide, and determined executive action would go a long way here. A hundred outstanding issues between the United States and China exist at any given moment, from territorial disputes to currency problems to regional dangers. Five or six issues, I suppose, are worked out by the principals when they speak, as they will this week when President Obama and China's new president, Xi Jinping, meet right here in Southern California. Whether the African elephants will survive, whether gangs and terrorists will rule the savannah, belongs among those five or six central issues.

Exactly how such matters are handled at the commanding heights, I could only guess. But it needs saying at such a meeting, in so many words, that surely Yao Ming is the future of China and not Zhao Bai; the prospering young man who takes responsibility, and not the prideful old carver who just doesn't give a damn. We in America know a little something about vain luxuries and conspicuous consumption ourselves, and don't present ourselves as spotless. But the checkered history of Western nations, the harm left behind by our own wretched excess, including the very crimes that first drove the elephant into this nightmare world, is no license for others to repeat them, least of all when this crime can never be undone. For ages to come, one way or the other, people will come to Africa to see the beauty of its forests and plains. Without that sight like no other, without the silhouette of the herds in the distance, it will never be the same, it will feel empty and stilled by absence, like the familiar places of a friend we have lost -- "Here is where they used to be" -- and always visitors to Africa will think: "China." This cannot be how a great people, living out whatever destiny the Chinese see for themselves, wish to be known by the rest of humanity.

The owner of a pricey ivory shop in Shanghai told the Times that a gift of his wares "says this relationship is as precious as ivory." An American president, in solidarity with African, European Union, and G-8 nations, could say to his Chinese counterpart, "This relationship is more precious than ivory," so let's deal with it quickly, accepting equal responsibility to a continent where both our nations can do a lot of good instead of a lot of harm. No nation, whatever its past offenses, current troubles, or aspirations, will want the vanishing of the elephant on its record. Here's a last chance, for all of us, to set things right, without need of problems and penalties that would cost far more than any country's stake in ivory.

[Mel]

It would put some life into CITES, meanwhile, if our delegation were instructed to initiate, right now, an honest, "time-bound" debate about who's doing what to cause this mayhem and what forceful penalties are in order. And those penalties cannot issue from CITES alone. China some years ago finally got serious about banning the domestic trade in rhino horns -- a Chinese law enforced with quite severe punishments -- for one simple reason: the United States finally got serious about trade sanctions. A legal recourse known as the Pelly Amendment authorizes presidential action against nations that fail to comply with international conservation regimes. Were the Obama administration to invoke this authority in the case of ivory, instantly life would become much harder for ivory dealers, and the prospects much better for elephants.

Why not also a presidential speech about Africa's ordeal, on the theme of an all-encompassing ban on ivory, a complete ban on sales in America to set the standard, the destruction of all stockpiles, the confident expectation of support among friends in Asia, and material aid for on-the-ground deterrence, with Yao Ming, leaders of the range states, and a hundred African champions of the elephant to share the stage? All those anti-poaching protests in Nairobi and elsewhere are meant to get our attention and China's, too. A White House event will gain them both in a hurry. For Westerners, President Obama observed in his book, Africa can be "an idea more than an actual place." So, live from the East Room, let the world hear from people who know the actual place and love it.

Across Asia, as these signals began to register, a wave of interdictions, roundups, shutdowns, and newly inspired reforms would soon be underway, exactly as Steve Itela, director of Kenya's Youth for Conservation, envisions: "China could end the killing by immediately closing its domestic ivory markets and severely punishing citizens engaged in illegal ivory trade. But it chooses ivory trinkets for a luxury market over live elephants." A different set of options, all around, will yield a different set of choices. "White gold," the moment that fundamental political and economic interests are felt even slightly on the other side of the scale, will seem a lot less precious to all concerned.

[Mel]

Mrs. Clinton noted that "the United States is the second-largest destination market for illegally trafficked wildlife in the world. And that is something we are going to address." We are also a prime destination for the "trophies" of slaughtered elephants, and why not address that, too? With so many of them dying as it is in Africa, do we really need Bob Parsons, the Trump boys, and that whole crowd going over there to kill even more?

Authority for the 1989 presidential order banning ivory imports derives from the African Elephant and Conservation Act of the previous year. Imports from blood sport were exempted at the behest of the big-game hunting industry, a subculture of sadism that would appall the average citizen. Amend that law and also the Endangered Species Act, to bar any elephant product, and thousands of elephants will be saved, just like that. The heart of America will be with President Obama all the way. As for House and Senate Republicans, eager to "rebrand" themselves, it doesn't get much easier than a chance to show compassion for their own party symbol.

The European Union likewise treats elephant trophies as "personal effects" carted in from abroad, even as customs authorities are suddenly finding smugglers sneaking the other way, with tusks taken at zoos and, not long ago, hacked off the skeleton of a beast from the menagerie of Louis XIV in France's Museum of Natural History. You know you've got an ivory crisis when you're catching poachers in the streets of Paris, and the EU should act accordingly. All of our countries would be doing rhinos, lions, polar bears, and many other threatened or endangered animals a big favor with a ban on every last "trophy" import, while also calling public attention to the final martyrdom of the elephant.
Instead of sending more killers over there, let's send more protectors. And let's direct aid to the scattered platoons of rangers, militia, and private charities already giving their all.

[Mel]

They are people like Daphne Sheldrick, who was interviewed at her shelter in Kenya not long ago by Chelsea Clinton for NBC News. With her daughter Angela and a team of men, Daphne is among those who rescue the calves who got away. What a strange sight the cameras caught: a little herd of five or six, led down a trail by an African man, all just baby elephants. And the woman has been doing this for 50 years, her only thanks the sight of severely traumatized fellow creatures growing to maturity, living in peace, and learning to trust. At first, she says, "they think we're the enemy." It takes a little while, after that first impression that mankind has made on them, but they figure it out. The orphans see all of the other things that we can do, all of the other powers that we have. Each time, it's just one baby elephant saved, a little thing done with great love. But there is more beauty to the picture than in all the carving factories of Asia. I hope Chelsea shared some of this with her father. Maybe the Clinton Global Initiative can get involved, so that all the victims of poaching will have an advocate in the most persuasive man in America.

Then there's an item out of Gabon, reported in the UK's Daily Mail, that someone in Hollywood needs to take a look at. It's about a fellow in that country, "a mild-mannered British zoology professor" named Lee White, who left his post at Stirling University in Manchester to save the elephants and now leads an army of 250 rangers -- placed at his disposal by President Ali Bongo -- to secure the nation's 13 parks. The military has offered an additional force of 3,000 soldiers, and one day every herd in the rainforests of Gabon can relax at least a little under the protection of the legion of Professor White. "I know I am in a strange position," he told the paper. "But this is no longer a biological issue -- it is a security issue. Either people like me can keep studying these animals until they disappear or we have to join the fight to protect them." Jungles, ruthless gangs, brave African fighters, this gallant man -- get it all in the script, and find the next Peter O'Toole to play the part.