ELEPHANTS in Kenya are under threat from a fresh spate of poaching. They killed the matriarch first, forcing her daughters into a huddle. Then, with two semi-automatic rifles, they picked off each elephant with a single shot to the brain.
They killed the matriarch first, forcing her daughters into a huddle. Then, with two semi-automatic rifles, they picked off each elephant with a single shot to the brain.
A few hours later elite trackers from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) cast aside hastily cut thorn branches from the carcasses. They had followed the poachers for four days over 320km of ash-dry savannah expecting to make contact that morning. Instead they unearthed seven gory sets of tusks cached nearby (as former poachers, they knew where to look) and pressed on after the gang.
The slaughter of 10 elephants in Tsavo National Park three weeks ago was Kenya’s worst case of ivory poaching since 1987. That was around the beginning of the end of a 20-year epidemic, which wiped out more than 90% of the country’s herds. This latest incident, according to the region’s leading conservationists, may be the beginning of a new holocaust.
“The elements have been in place for some time and now we’re seeing a resurgence in elephant poaching,” said former KWS boss Richard Leakey, whose anti-poaching measures checked the elephant’s decline for the first time in a century. “This is of serious concern to me.”
Last year 57 Kenyan elephants were reported killed for their tusks, after a decade of almost no poaching; in the past month alone 18 more have been found slain. The true figures will be much higher. KWS expects to find only 15% of poached elephants and in Tsavo even that is ambitious.
For more than a year peacekeepers, missionaries and conservationists have been filing random reports from Africa’s murkier corners of a rekindled ivory trade. On camelback, bicycles and bare shoulders, ivory is flowing from the war-wrecked Democratic Republic of Congo. In Tanzania 3,2 tonnes were recently seized. In Khartoum’s souks, ivory prices have hit a 13-year high. But if another elephant war has begun, it is in Kenya, symbolic of a continent’s victory against poaching, that the first shots have been fired.
Hollowed by hyenas, sagging from the spine like badly pitched tents, the 10 carcasses in Tsavo were stinking. In the brittle thorns nearby, eight heavily armed KWS trackers were hunkering.
Fresh tracks of eight armed men – wearing tell-tale Somali sandals filed smooth – were found on the park’s northern edge. Informers from the Oroma, a tribe of ethnic Somalis living to the north, reported them asking directions to the kill site.
Two days after they killed the elephants the trackers caught up with the poachers. There was a brief firefight and the poachers escaped with one man wounded in the leg, minus a rifle-propelled grenade ? and directly towards a KWS ambush. The gang leader, Abdurrahman Hussein Abdi, approached the Daka Wachu watering-hole early on April 14, during Corporal Quri Huka’s watch.
“He knelt down to fill his water bottle with his gun resting across his thigh,” Huka said. “When I questioned him, he rolled and fired three shots. So I shot him through the heart. It was the right thing to do. If the others return, I will gladly kill them too.”
The surviving poachers’ bloodied tracks disappeared towards the Somali border. “Sometimes it is helpful to let a couple get away to spread the word,” said Danny Woodley, warden of Tsavo’s northern sector. He should know. Bill Woodley, his father and the park’s legendary first warden, used to drop grenades on poachers from a light aircraft. Danny Woodley prefers to use a heavy machine gun mounted on his single-propeller Cessna. “Scares the hell out of them.”
Until Leakey took over the wildlife service, its demoralised and underfunded rangers were among Kenya’s most prolific poachers. And with KWS badly hit by a 30% drop in tourist revenues post-September 11, some are attributing the rise in poaching to its decline.
“There has been a lot of complacency at KWS,” said Leakey, following the killing of four black rhinos in Tsavo. “What worries me is that there could have been complicity by some of the officials involved.”
KWS director Joe Kioko, who well remembers the bad old days, rejects the suggestion. “We are having to tighten our belts, but security and intelligence operations are not suffering,” he said. “If there was a certain laxity, there was no corruption. And now we are fully engaged.”
In fact, Kenya’s success against poaching had less to do with KWS than the collapse of the ivory market following a global trade ban in 1989 – also partly a result of Leakey’s efforts. “If the demand is sufficient, poachers can always enter the park,” said Tsavo’s chief warden, Peter Leitoroi. “Even if we believe they may not make it out.”
Several new pressures are fuelling that demand. The first is from the markets of South-East Asia, where European tourists buy thousands of illegal ivory trinkets every year.
According to a new report by Save the Elephants, about 80% of Asia’s elephant populations have been poached for ivory in the past 14 years and Africa is making up the shortfall. “The biggest buyers are the French, then the Germans and Italians,” said Esmond Bradley Martin, the report’s author.
Poaching may also be rising on the back of hopes that Southern African countries will succeed in lifting the trade ban at a meeting of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species in November.
South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia claim the right to sell their ivory to raise cash for conservation. This is despite overwhelming evidence that any legalisation of the trade stimulates an illegal trade in countries such as Kenya, where poaching cannot be controlled.
According to Iain Douglas-Hamilton from Save the Elephants: “Overturning the ban could trigger a renewal of demand for ivory in the Far East, and another holocaust among elephants.”