The ivory stockpile in the secure government warehouse – six tonnes of scarred tusks, glossy Confucius statuettes with $10,000 (more than £6,000) price stickers, coffee table items, and too many chunky cuff bracelets to count – represents millions of dollars and the slaughter of thousands of African elephants. On 14 November, at Barack Obama’s instruction, […]
Tag: illegal wildlife trade
How YouTube has put the world’s only poisonous primates at risk
It all started with a video: in 2009 a Russian man uploaded a video of himself tickling his exotic pet (a pygmy slow loris) from Vietnam onto the hugely popular site YouTube. Since then the video has been viewed over half a million times. But a new study in the open source journal in PLoS […]
Why endangered species need conservation champions
Without heroic conservationists many of today’s most beloved species would be extinct: think of pandas, tigers, and elephants. By single-mindly focused on saving a particular species, these conservation champions bring much-needed research, publicity, and, most importantly, targeted actions to keep an imperiled animal from the brink. Through their own exuberance, these heroes also gather others […]
Illegal wildlife trade flourishes in Sumatra
In a chilly rain on Sunday, in a town just a few kilometers beyond the edge of a protected Sumatran rainforest, a young orangutan sat perched on a piece of plywood and grabbed the metal wires of his tiny cage. He has sat in that cage for six months and, like dozens of other species […]
Lord’s Resistance Army funded by elephant poaching, report finds
The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is using lucrative elephant poaching for ivory to fund its activities, according to a report published on Tuesday. Eyewitness accounts from park rangers, Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) escapees and recent senior defectors report that the fugitive warlord Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes […]
Seven rhinos killed by poachers in Kenya’s bloodiest week
Gunshots rang out across the wilderness on 23 May when poachers shot to death one rhino in Lake Nakuru National Park. Then three days later on 26 May they struck two sites, Solio Ranch near Nyeri in central Kenya, and at Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary in Tsavo West National Park killing one rhino in each protected […]