Stop Wildlife Poisoning

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Aug 17 2008 | By: Martin

Apparently poisonig has become the stylish technique of depressing our wildlife and all for the wrong reasons.

With the poisoned tip of a metal arrow piercing her right leg, a pregnant elephant stumbles miles through the African bush towards her death.

After two days of agony she falls to the red earth, while her killers, following on bicycles and carrying butchering knives, wait for the end to come.

In the darkness of a Kenyan night, the four poachers watch as she first loses her unborn calf in a spontaneous miscarriage provoked by the poison in her body.

An hour later, after the 35-year- old elephant dies, they move in - hacking off her face to steal the two precious ivory tusks which will make them rich for years.

Soon, they hope, the tusks will have been smuggled out of Africa and be on their way to a factory in Beijing, to be carved into jewellery and chopsticks.

Just a few weeks ago, though, these poachers were caught. James Ekiru, the head ranger at Rukinga Wildlife Sanctuary (which is in sight of Mount Kilimanjaro and two hours’ drive from the port of Mombassa), says: ‘We followed their tracks, and 24 hours after they killed this mother elephant, we found them with the tusks lying on the ground.

‘They were starting to butcher her meat - cutting it into kilo pieces. We arrested two of them, but two more got away. They were local men.

‘We suspect the elephant was killed “to order”, and that her tusks would have been smuggled to China.

Read it all in Massacre of the giants: Once hunted to near extinction, Africas elephants slowly pulled back from the brink

Share This

Tags: Kenya Wildlife Service, poisoning, Rukinga Wildlife Sanctuary

3 responses so far