This document discusses the illegal ivory trade and its devastating impact on elephant populations across Africa and Asia. It describes how poachers are killing hundreds of elephants to meet the demand for ivory in China and other Asian markets. The document highlights both the violence of poaching as well as conservation efforts to protect elephants in national parks in places like Kenya, Cameroon, and Chad. However, elephants that wander outside of parks are vulnerable to poachers, and smugglers are finding new ways to traffic illegal ivory internationally.

1. VORY WARS
Some of the last big tuskers gather in Tsavo, Kenya. A single large tusk sold on the local black
market can bring $6,000, enough to support an unskilled Kenyan worker for ten years.

2. Bodies are what remain in Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjidah National Park after one of the largest
mass elephant slaughters in decades. Armed with grenades and AK-47s, poachers killed more
than 300.

3. The home of a Filipino collector is lavish with ivory religious icons. “I don’t see the elephant,”
says another Filipino collector. “I see the Lord.”

4. A worker in China’s largest
ivory-carving factory finishes a
piece symbolizing prosperity.
China legally bought 73 tons of
ivory from Africa in 2008; since
then, poaching and smuggling
have both soared.

5. Smugglers failed to get this contraband past Kenya’s law enforcement, but the animals are still
gone. Small tusks indicate that young elephants were poached.

6. Kruba Dharmamuni, aka the Elephant Monk, keeps
Asian elephants at his temple in Thailand. Activists
accuse him of starving one elephant to use its ivory for
amulets, a charge he rejects.

7. To keep the ivory from the black market, a plainclothes ranger hacks the tusks off a bull elephant
killed illegally in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. In the first half of this year six park rangers died
protecting Kenya’s elephants; meanwhile, rangers killed 23 poachers.

8. A Chinese reporter in Kenya covers the 2011 burning of 5.5 tons of smuggled ivory. Kenya
helped launch a global ivory ban in 1989 but lately has been stockpiling its ivory. The ivory here
belonged to other countries.

9. A sculpture like this can take a master carver years to produce. Front and center are the popular
Taoist gods Shou, Lu, and Fu—symbols of long life, money, and luck. “We hope—no, we insist—
we can continue to protect these skills,” says Wang Shan, secretary-general of the China Arts
and Crafts Association.

10. Filipino master ivory carver Marcial Bernales transforms an elephant tusk into the head and
hands of the Madonna. His first love is carving wood, but ivory has a special draw. “Much high
prices,” he says. Smuggled ivory flows to Asia via the Philippines, itself a destination for illegal
ivory, which is carved into religious icons and often smuggled to other countries, including the
United States. Raw tusks are not Bernales’s only medium—the heads of some of his saints began
as billiard balls.

11. A cemetery for privately owned elephants in Surin, Thailand, shows deep devotion. Thailand
allows internal trading of ivory from domesticated Asian elephants, and smuggled African ivory
finds its way into the mix.

12. Last Stand in Zakouma

13. Slaking their thirst at a dry season water hole on the Salamat River, elephants in Zakouma
National Park have flourished, with their numbers growing from 1,100 to around 3,500 during
the past 21 years. Outside the park, the scene is not so benign.

14. Skin and bones are all that remain of the 20 elephants killed last May just outside the southern
border of Zakouma National Park. Poachers hauled away the ivory, leaving park officials with an
ongoing challenge: How to protect herds that wander beyond the park's protective umbrella.

15. When one matriarch searches for food outside Zakouma, a herd of 800 elephants falls in behind.
Wise old females, responsible for the well-being of family groups, know every trail and creek
crossing, every village and road. They know where dangers lie, and where to find the best
forage.

16. Armed guards patrol Zakouma, but they're outnumbered by poachers—and outgunned. In the
past eight years, six guards have been killed by poachers, and at least six poachers by guards.

17. After ivory poachers hacked the face off a 20-year-old elephant, park guards were left with few
clues and a cold trail.

18. Park guards will lock up these tusks, but the men who killed the elephant got away. Seizures of
illegal ivory reached record levels in 2005. In China—the fastest growing consumer—dealers sell
worked ivory on the Internet, shipping it worldwide./

19. Water holes are in short supply at the end of the dry season, when as many as 500 elephants
can converge on this pool near Tinga. By June, torrential rains engulf the park, and the herds
leave in search of better food. At Zakouma, sanctuary comes and goes with the seasons.

20. BY
J.JAYAKRISHNAN