End Wildlife Trafficking Courtesy of WCS

Don’t miss the opportunity to read Caitrin Nicol’s Do Elephants Have Souls? in The New Atlantis. It’s a lengthy but beautiful read about elephant life and behavior.

Nicol says, “One of the major clues that elephants have something we would recognize as inner lives is their extraordinary memories. This is attested to by outward indicators ranging from the practical — a matriarch’s recollection of a locale, critical to leading her family to food and water — to the passionate — grudges that are held against specific people or types of people for decades or even generations, or fierce affection for a long-lost friend.”

Take the link with you when you’re commuting or traveling! And get involved.

Still photo from the new documentary film The Ivory Game (2016)

Every day an average of 96 elephants are slaughtered for their ivory – primarily for the growing middle class in China to have trinkets such as chopsticks and carved miniature elephants.  Poaching goes on in multiple countries including the Central African Republic, Chad, Kenya, and South Africa. Some of the worst carnage was reported in a heartbreaking piece in The New Yorker (2015).

In September 2016, the US Congress passed the END Wildlife Trafficking Law [Eliminate Neutralize and Disrupt Wildlife Trafficking] to better protect wild elephant populations. President Obama signed the bill into law in October.

A pile of seized tusks in Kenya. Still from Ivory: A Crime Story directed by Sergey Yastrzhembsky (2016)

Do you want to help ?

You can take action to help protect the remaining elephant populations in Asia and Africa from extinction. Go to the Wildlife Conservation Society’s site 96 Elephants for many ways to take action

We cannot be the generation that allows elephants to disappear. Extinction is forever.