Killed for crafts!

L is for lion, Z is for zebra and E is for elephant. After todays film (Battle for the elephants, National Geographic) and discuss at Brookhouse school I wonder if this is what I can teach the children 10 years ahead from now??

Each day around 70 are elephants killed in Kenya and the surrounding countries, only because of their tusks which nowadays rarely grow longer than 50 cm. The amount of this wonderful animal walking around on the savanna has decreased with 94 000 000 elephants in 73 years. At the same time Chinas business with Africa has increased with 94 billion per year. 

The elephant crisis is not very known. Especially not known as a problem caused by a huge demand of ivory from China where they do old traditional crafts in the believe that the elephant who was killed because of this item is actually happy. The elephants used to be a holy animal for buddhism, daoism and many religions. Now it´s a holy animal for another religion - capitalism. 

An 12-15 year old elephant do still have small tusks, around 50 cm, but it´s still a well paid kill and you don´t have a lot to fear. If you kill a panda in China you get 15 years in prison. If you kill a elephant in Kenya, you get a penalty of 40 000 ksh (480 USD), which is about 10% of the real value of the ivory which makes it to a very good business anyway. Even if all steps in the business is illegal it's still an easy job to get the ivory out of the country since only 1% of the 

60 000 containers which are send from Mombasa port every day is checked. 

But, if you kill an elephant you kill a heritage and you kill the nature since the elephants is one of our most important distributer of seeds and the green, growing environment now turns into dessert all over the country where the elephants used to live before they were killed. They are killed because we want more money in our pockets, and because our religion, capitalism, tells us that valuable items are more important than our nature. 

So what to do? How can you really change something? 

1) Do not buy ivory! And tell people about that ivory actually come from a DEAD and KILLED elephant, not a still playful little creature running around on our earth. 

2) Tell kids about our nature, spend time in the nature and give them the feeling of that they own the nature (and so also the problems and fights we have to take to save it. It´s first when you own a problem and can identify with it that you are ready to care for it.). We will face several fights if we want to be able the see animals outside the zoo, not only elephants. 

3) See one or two of the films suggested down here: 

Family of elephants slaughtered for ivory, Kenya january 2013 (49 seconds)

Battle for elephants (trailer, 39 seconds) 

Battle for elephants (full movie, 55 minutes)