Kenya Burns Elephant Ivory Worth $105
Million to Defy Poachers
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN April
30, 2016
New York Times
NAIROBI,
Kenya — What do you do when you have more than $100 million worth of ivory
sitting around, just collecting dust?
You
burn it, of course.
That is
what Kenya did on Saturday, when President Uhuru Kenyatta lit a huge
pyre of elephant tusks as a way to show the world that Kenya is serious about
ending the illegal ivory trade, which is threatening to push wild elephants to
extinction.
“No
one, and I repeat, no one, has any business in trading in ivory, for this trade
means death — the death of our elephants and the death of our natural
heritage,” Mr. Kenyatta said.
In the
past few years, heavily armed poachers, using military tactics, have wiped out
tens of thousands of elephants across Africa. Many of the tusks enter an
underground pipeline to Asia, especially China, where ivory is used to make
eyeglass frames, combs, statuettes and other trinkets.
Wildlife experts say
the street price of a kilogram of ivory is around
$1,000. On Saturday, Kenya set alight 105 metric tons of ivory — its stockpile
of confiscated and recovered tusks. It was the most ivory ever destroyed at one
time, representing 6,000 to 7,000 dead elephants.
At
current prices, and without including the rhino horns also burned, that is a
$105 million bonfire.
Richard
Leakey, one of Kenya’s leading conservationists, said he was “humbled, sad and
encouraged.”
“We
shouldn’t have to burn 105 tons of ivory and 1.5 tons of rhino horn,” he said.
“It is a disgraceful shame this continues.”
This
was not the first time that truckloads of tusks had been burned. Mr. Leakey
presided over a large ivory bonfire in Kenya in 1989. Since then, many other
countries have done the same to make the statement that ivory is worthless —
unless it is on an elephant.
For the
first time in days, a pale blue sky stretched over Nairobi. Heavy rains had
soaked the city in the past week, causing deadly floods.
But the
mountains of ivory, even though they had been sitting out in the rain,
went up
fast. Minutes after Mr. Kenyatta stuck a flaming torch inside one of the
pyramids of tusks, columns of gray smoke curled out, wafting up toward the
evening sky.
Questions:
1. What
the heck is ivory?
2. Why
is is so valuable?
3. What
is a poacher?
4. How
does a poacher get ivory?
5. How
would you or I get some ivory?
6. Why
would the government of Kenya burn it?
7.
Shouldn't the government sell it and use
the money to pay for more wildlife officers?
