More than 20,000 elephants were killed on the continent last year for their ivory tusks – which earn a fortune as they are traded illegally in China and south-east Asia.
Their tragic situation has led British wildlife photographer, Paul Goldstein, to make an impassioned plea to the public about elephant conservation – using his majestic photo album, taken over 25 years of watching the animals.
Source: theboldcorsicanflame.wordpress.com
GR: The photo slide show is great.
But what are we going to do? Taking an animal’s life for food or for a small body part is common human behavior. This makes it difficult to enlist local protection for endangered wildlife. There are examples of local people fighting to protect their land. The motivation is usually fear of change, or economic self-interest blended with appreciation for the land. There must be cases where the fight was purely out of love for the animals, but I don’t know this. Anyway, such cases are too rare to reverse the great extinction that is underway.
Perhaps the answer to elephant, pangolin, rhino, tiger, and wolf protection is to relocate people who care to the places of need. Just as Peace Corps volunteers go to help the people, Wildlife Corps volunteers could go to help the animals. Social and political problems would be huge, but not insoluble.
