Kenya’s president has set fire to a 150 tonne pile of elephant tusks and rhino horn as part of protests against the ivory trade.
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Leakey attributes the current rise in the demand for ivory to one-off permitted sales of tusks.
He added that Kenya will rally behind global campaigns to push for a total ban on trade in ivory and other wildlife products. “We will not be the Africans who stood by as we lost our elephants”, he added. Many courageous wardens and rangers have lost their lives, communities have been compromised, and hundreds of poachers, who are so often just pawns of the wildlife crime syndicates, have been killed, ‘ Mr Oloo said. These captured tusks intended for trade have gathered dust for decades, but authorities will destroy them all in a spectacular message to poachers. However, Kenya’s bonfire has also drawn criticism from some in the conservationist community who say that destroying large caches of ivory only makes it more rare and valuable, and thus, encourages more poaching.
President Kenyatta said the burning of trophies was meant to reaffirm that Kenya does not place monetary value on its iconic wildlife species and will always go a step further to conserve them.
African governments are fighting the illegal trade in wildlife goods, but they have long puzzled over what to do with confiscated ivory and horn.
The pyres were fueled with about 20,000 liters of jet fuel and oxygen, said Robin Hollister, the event’s fire master, as a thick plume of white smoke billowed over the yellow flames consuming the ivory. That opposition to Saturday’s burn included the government of Botswana, where about half of Africa’s elephants live, and which has enacted some of the strongest policies against poachers on the continent, including a shoot-to-kill order, and a total ban on all hunting in the country. “We need to kill the trade”, she said.
A record number of rhinos were poached in Africa previous year, around 1,338 and contributing to this stockpile, an elephant is killed every 15 minutes for its tusks. “I will rather wait for the judgement of the future generations who I am sure will appreciate the action we have taken”, Kenyatta said Saturday at the ivory burn.
Furthermore, at least 1,338 rhinos were killed in Africa past year, as demand for their horns continues to rise in East and Southeast Asia.
The haul represented almost the entire stock of Kenya’s confiscated ivory and included tusks, ivory sculptures and rhino horn said to be worth £82m on the black market.
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China, which has tightened its laws on ivory imports, allows the resale of ivory bought before the 1989 ban, but activists say the trade in legal ivory acts as a cover for illegal imports and call for a complete ban on sales. During a full life, an elephant generates 76 times more in tourism revenue than its ivory is worth in the Asian market, according to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a Nairobi-based elephant rescue group.
