It's a grim story. But it's unfortunately not a new story. It's a story about elephants. But the greed and the failure to take effective action to curb that greed underlying the story means it could be about other creatures as well, the American bison, for instance. For the bison, 30 million of which once roamed America, there were 150 years ago two issues at work simultaneously, greed and furtherance of the ethnic cleansing of the Plains tribes so that the march of Manifest Destiny would not be hindered by "savages." The bison hunters, on government or private contract, took the hides at first, leaving the rest to rot. Soon, with the market saturated, they didn't even bother with the hides.
With the elephant, it's all about the ivory, the tusks. Once, not so many years ago, those tusks were huge. But thanks to the poachers who outnumber and outgun game wardens, fewer and fewer elephants live long enough for their tusks to grow so large, and the market is now filled with smaller tusks at higher prices. All of it made so that some assholes can get rich and some other assholes can show off their ivory trinkets as proof of their status. International law has prohibited trade in ivory for decades. But the ban hasn't stopped the poachers or the buyers.
At The Atlantic, Matthew Scully writes—Inside the Global Industry That's Slaughtering Africa's Elephants. Obama should make it a priority issue—in his meeting with China's Xi Jinping:
Destruction and Death, as Pope Francis offered this homily in St. Peter's Square, had just left the scene in the central African nation of Chad, where in a single night in mid-March 89 elephants were slaughtered for their tusks. Reports described the ivory poachers as 50 or so men on camel and horseback, speaking Arabic, armed with AK-47s, and presumed to be the same band that came over from Sudan last year to execute more than 450 elephants in Cameroon—on that foray, dispatching their victims with rocket-propelled grenades.
In Chad, near the Cameroon border to the south, they left their mark by sparing not even the 33 pregnant females and 15 elephant calves, and by hacking off the tusks while some of the creatures were still alive. There were four park rangers on duty that night, short a fifth guard who was murdered by poachers last year. But they were far away at the time, and, in any case, would have been helpless against overwhelming force. Among other problems, the elephant preserve is about 850 square miles, a big stretch of creation for just four guys to protect.
East, west, and central—everywhere there are elephants in Africa, there are "poachers," a word that now seems far too small for the enormity of their offense. And if we want to take seriously those words from Francis -- a new pontiff named for the saint who despised cruelty, whose very first sermon spoke of "respecting each of God's creatures"—this would be a very good place to focus our attention. Unless Western and African nations can turn things around fast, to protect the 400,000 or so left, then the elephants of Africa, pretty much all of them, will be gone.
A United Nations Rapid Response Assessment (the UN may be slow to act, but the assessments come quick) puts last year's losses around 32,000 African elephants, as compared to 2011 casualties of 25,000, reporting "mass and gruesome killings of elephants." From the air, as correspondent Bryan Christy of National Geographic writes from Cameroon, it looks like this: "[T]he scattered bodies present a senseless crime scene - you can see which animals fled, which mothers tried to protect their young, how one terrified herd of 50 went down together."
From the air, too, is how they're often slaughtered—in numbers, Christy thinks, perhaps double those UN estimates. It's guesswork, more speculative than ever as poachers pick up the pace in military-style operations that now include firing their AK-47s from helicopters. Like the more advanced weaponry of the killers, their night-vision goggles and other such assets, and the sheer number of them aswarm in Africa, the helicopters signal yet another bad turn in this old struggle. There's big money in ivory, a boundless market for it, and everyone knows where most of it is heading. […]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—What The Soldiers Are Saying:
Across a vast cultural divide, language is just one impediment. Young Iraqi soldiers, ill-equipped and drawn from a disenchanted Sunni Arab minority, say they are not even sure what they are fighting for. They complain bitterly that their American mentors don't respect them.
In fact, the Americans don't: Frustrated U.S. soldiers question the Iraqis' courage, discipline and dedication and wonder whether they will ever be able to fight on their own, much less reach the U.S. military's goal of operating independently by the fall.
"I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period," said 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long Island, N.Y., the executive officer of McGovern's company, who sold his share in a database firm to join the military full time after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won't be ready before I leave. And I know I'll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don't think they'll be ready then."
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