Chinese elephant massacre in Africa (1)

From: Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Africa’s elephants are being massacred to extinction. The killing has accelerated markedly with China’s presence in Africa, with lots of evidence pointing to sharply increased Chinese smuggling to supply a vanity-luxury market at home(see below).

With today’s trends, at a rate now estimated at 100 per day, the African elephant will soon be extinct, and China and Chinese greed will be blamed for eternity, for a world without elephants (cf. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/06/a-world-without-elephants-blame-china.html), even if of course there is an illicit trade to other countries too, like Viet Nam; even if we could also blame those corrupt Africans who help satisfy all this greed; even as we remember that earlier, in the 19th and 20th century, before conservation, Europeans and Americans depleted African wildlife on a grand scale; and even as there is also the loss of habitat to agriculture, and so on. But the current developments is beyond all that: this is the end time, with massive illegal killings in protected areas, above all to supply Chinese buyers. Continue reading