There is a lot going on with the fight to end animal poaching around the world, but a lot of the focus has to do with animals like elephants, which have valuable ivory tusks that have been traded around on the black market for ages.
Kenya is now making a stand against elephant poaching in its most recent announcement that it will be incinerating mounts of its ivory stock this Saturday.
Totaling in at over 100 tonnes of ivory, which equates to about 6700 elephants that were killed for it, the burning will ensure that this stock is not used for illegal trade and produces a strong political statement against illegal elephant poaching for their valuable ivory tusks.
This stockpile is what Kenya has confiscated from poachers, but there are still several tons of the stuff going around elsewhere that elephants were murdered for.
Poaching remains a great threat for the elephant species as a whole. Kenya estimates that population numbers of the elephant in Africa have been halved in the past decade, which is a striking disappointment for animal lovers.
“The results have been catastrophic: there are probably half as many elephants in Africa today as there were a decade ago.” Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta said in a statement. “If that does not change, our children will be the first Africans in 10,000 years to grow up in a continent without these beautiful animals.”
At the current rate, if poaching is not stopped, African elephants could become extinct as soon as 2025. There are estimated to be as much as 500,000 African elephants left in the wild, and as little as 450,000, but poaching has taken around 30,000 away from the continent every single year.
This is not the future we want for the species, or for the upcoming generations of those native to the region that will grow up around these magnificent animals.
Source: Kenya Daily Nation via BBC
