Milwaukee Co. Zoo to hold World Elephant Day events Wednesday

The 4(d) rule seeks to ban the sale or offer of sale of ivory in interstate or foreign commerce and delivery, receipt, carrying, transport or shipment of ivory for commercial purposes except for defined antiques and certain manufactured items containing de minimis quantities of ivory.

“Ivory and rhino horn, derived from the illegal killing of elephants and rhinos in Africa and Asia, are typically trafficked by transnational organized crime syndicates across the world, including into the United States”, Cristián Samper, Wildlife Conservation Society president and CEO, said in a statement.

If you want to save elephants, don’t legalise the worldwide trade in ivory.

Elephants exhibit the best human traits – the same can’t be said for humans. “AZA members from coast-to-coast are committed to raising awareness among their millions of visitors about the dangers confronting elephants”. Harvey proposes that Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa join the remaining African countries which are home to elephants by moving their populations from Cites’ Appendix II to Appendix I, which would rule out such sales. “We urge the administration to finalize its critical regulatory changes to crack down on ivory trafficking as quickly as possible”. “We’ve come together as scientists to ask the U.S. government to end this destructive trade once and for all”.

Around 1,000 African elephants were killed between 2010 and 2012.

Particular emphasis should be given to eroding demand among two important sections of the Asian market – those consumers who buy ivory as an inflation-proof form of investment and those who purchase it as a status symbol, often within an established gift-giving tradition among elites.

This World Elephant Day (12 August) IFAW will post a tweet and a picture of an elephant every 15 minutes – 96 in all – to commemorate the daily toll of elephants killed for their ivory. Central Africa’s elephants are being poached at a shocking and unsustainable rate of 9 percent per year.

A new economic analysis concludes that the most effective way to ensure the survival of Africa’s elephant populations threatened by rampant poaching is not to legalise the global trade in ivory, but to ramp up demand reduction programmes and improve poaching prevention strategies, followed by a ban on domestic ivory trading. “Until now, no one has been able to show how the pieces of this deadly puzzle connect – how the ivory is stripped from the corpses of elephants systematically killed by increasingly militarized poachers”.

Garcia says one approach would be making more people aware of how illegal ivory trade helps criminal syndicates and terrorist groups financially.

“Part of the fight against ivory and illegal wildlife trafficking is disrupting potential markets”.

Elephants face a variety of threats in the wild, including continued loss of their habitats, illegal poaching, the black market ivory trade, and mistreatment in captivity.

Elephants are iconic, awe-inspiring animals and perform critical ecological roles in the forests and savannahs they inhabit.

The situation for both African and Asian elephants remains “exceedingly dire”, according to World Elephant Day organisers.