Romania has banned all trophy hunting of brown bears, wolves, lynx and wild cats in a surprise decision that gives Europe’s largest population of large carnivores a reprieve from its most severe and immediate threat. The move on Tuesday reverses a trend which has seen the number of large carnivores being shot by hunters grow […]
Tag: poaching
Zimbabwe accused of preparing to ship dozens of young elephants to China
Concerns have been raised that Zimbabwe is again preparing to send dozens of young elephants to wildlife parks in China. The government’s national park authority, ZimParks, began capturing elephants from Hwange national park in August and keeping them in pens at Umtshibi wildlife capture and relocation unit. The agency has said it plans to capture […]
POLL: Should there be a worldwide ban on the ivory trade?
The UK is putting elephants at risk of extinction through its broken promises on the ivory trade, according to campaigners. Before the last election, the Conservative party pledged to shut down the UK’s domestic ivory market: at the time 30,000 elephants a year were being slaughtered for their tusks. But no action has been taken. […]
POLL: Should the sale of elephant ivory be legalized?
World Elephant Day was not necessarily good news for Africa’s elephants: Pressure is mounting in southern Africa to lift the ban on the sale of ivory. In the mid-1980s, during the last great elephant poaching crisis, Africa lost nearly half its elephant population, roughly 600,000 animals, in a decade. But the world responded in 1989 […]
POLL: Should the killing of giraffes be outlawed?
Documentary filmmaker David Hamlin recalls the adrenalin rush when he was flying over the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Garamba National Park in late June and spotted three giraffes standing in a small clearing. “Seeing these giraffes from the air was really exciting,” says Hamlin, who was on assignment for National Geographic. “Seeing them anywhere […]
How to catch a poacher using fake eggs
Sometimes life really does imitate art. In the fourth season of the hit TV show, Breaking Bad, police put GPS devices on barrels of methylamine to try and track the show’s protagonists to their meth lab. Inspired by the episode, Kim Williams-Guillen, a conservationist with Paso Pacifico, decided to take the concept one step further: […]
POLL: Should the illegal otter trade in India be stopped?
A new TRAFFIC report sheds light on the intensifying illegal trade in Asian otters for their skin as well as the rise in illegal otter pet trade. India is a hotspot of otter poaching, according to a new report by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network. Of the 167 otter seizures in South and Southeast Asia […]
POLL: Should the EU support a total ban on the ivory trade?
Wildlife officials in nearly 30 African states say they are appalled by an EU decision to oppose a comprehensive global ban on the ivory trade. In a position paper released on 1 July, the European commission said that rather than an all-encompassing ban it would be better to encourage countries with growing elephant numbers to […]