Originally posted on Huffington Post on April 28, 2013:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-safina/an-elephant-named-tim-by-_b_3174913.html

 There are about 300 elephants in this group. They’re doing a lot of roaring and trumpeting. It’s unusual for them to be so vocal. But with the mating we just witnessed, they’ve had a lot of excitement. And there are a lot of smells in the air.

Tim, an exceptionally impressive male elephant, is 43 years old. Because males wander, Tim has not been seen for weeks. Now he is here, and he is in a heightened breeding condition called musth, dribbling a pungent-scented urine that tells the ladies and the guys alike that he’s the man. He crosses our path, and I get a whiff of him. To me, musth smells a little like patchouli.

Tim is doing no eating, just maintaining a vigilant presence. He owns two gigantic tusks, a little uneven in length, the larger nearly scraping the ground as he walks. Each likely weighs easily over 100 pounds. He looks like something prehistoric, like a mastodon. I did not think any elephants of this age and size survived, with such a price literally upon their heads. Indeed, he’s one of the oldest still-surviving elephants of the ongoing poaching frenzy.

Dr. Vicki Fishlock of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants has been studying the elephants here in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park for a couple of years. Vicki explains that Tim doesn’t worry about competition from smaller males. “He’s much more concerned about any males closer to his size.”

But there aren’t many males close to his size surviving.

Before coming here I’d been up north in Samburu; poaching around there has been worse than here in Amboseli. Vicki says, “Samburu had fabulous guys like Tim. They are all dead.”

But, Vicki adds, “There is some feeling of positive change.” A new wildlife guy in Tanzania saying all the right things. In Kenya there’s been a shakeup in the Wildlife Service and marches by Kenyans against poaching. Vicki concludes hopefully, “I feel like there are positive times ahead.”

We follow Tim as he follows a group of adult females and babies into an open acacia woodland that looks so much like the classic image of Africa. Vicki comments that these babies’ faces are starting to differentiate as they’re getting to be more than a year old, a new generation of individuals, making its bid. If it gets that chance.

What their future is, we cannot know. But concern about the present and the days to come runs deep.

Vicki adds, “Tim moves me to tears every time I see him. He can disappear for weeks at a time. We’re all so worried for him. And so relieved each time he reappears.”

I look at her and I do see tears welling up in her eyes. “The potential for heartbreak—,” she starts to say. “It scares me how much you can love them. It’s almost paralyzing.”

           But Vicki and some other people are far from paralyzed. They are actively forging the hope that elephants will need to survive. Worthy of your support, I thank and recommend: Amboseli Trust for Elephants, Save the Elephants, David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and Big Life Foundation.

Originally posted on Huffington Post April 18, 2013: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-safina/when-elephants-kill-cows-_b_2972937.html

Soila Sayialel of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants is behind the wheel as we drive to headquarters in Amboseli National Park in Kenya for an appointment to pay 2 men for 3 cows killed by elephants. The events have been verified by rangers. Why give money? Because when elephants kill cows, men kill elephants. Which makes elephants who’ve witnessed such encounters more inclined to kill more cows and more men. It’s like primitive tribal tit-for-tat warfare that never ends, endless skirmishes and retributions for which there is no solution and no resolution. Except money. Because to the Maasai pastoralists, cows are money. A “condolence” payment handily takes elephants out of the revenge cycle. Where does the money come from? Gifts. Donate online: ElephantTrust.org

Elephants sometimes kill cows but never kill donkeys. Men and boys—some barely adolescent—go into the bush with cows. Donkeys are owned by women. And women never accompany their donkeys into the bush—husbands don’t like that (not quite for reasons of their wives’ safety, I surmise). So donkeys just roam and return. But men bring livestock into confrontation with elephants. They try to push elephants from watering places, for instance. Men are the flashpoint. When an elephant registers its objection, it sometimes makes its opinion felt. And it may be answered with a flying spear, acutely and sometimes fatally finding its mark.

Its important to remember, though, that over centuries of Maasai occupation, wildlife could persist across immense spans of landscape in their traditional territories. As pastoralists yield to farmers and towns, Maasai herders seem less like the problem and more like the reason there is wildlife here at all. But the relationship isn’t always peaceful.

Elephants must leave the Park because it is much too small for them. Outside, they run into herders. Inside, they also run into herders. For reasons ranging from revenge to adolescent bravado to political protest, Maasai have on both sides of the park border sometimes hurt and killed elephants. Elephants fear Maasai people and run from recordings of Maasai—but not Western—voices. And occasionally when elephants get a chance to turn the tables, they do. Sometimes cows get killed, and sometimes men get killed.

Today we meet two men who’ve recently had cows killed by elephants. Both men are middle-aged, tall and thin, their skin shrunken over their cheek bones. Dressed in traditional robes and with long-stretched pierced earlobes hung with beaded pendant earrings, they represent a passing generation and old ways.

In Maa, her native language, Soila explains that they will be paid one fixed price as consolation, not compensation; there will be no haggling over how much a particular cow was worth. The men listen attentively. Abbey Lelai of the Kenya Wildlife Service—a pretty young woman in her early 20s, pert in her new uniform—formally thanks the men for entering this process and underscores Soila’s message. She emphasizes that the payment system is voluntary, not officially required, and that if they disrespect or abuse it, it can be withdrawn, denied, terminated. To the men, tough talk from women is something new under the sun. But as the sun arcs across the sky, it lights what had been shadowed. Times change.

Rather formally, the men in turn speak. They say that all the animals—including lions and hyenas—are good. But they wish to emphasize that they like and appreciate Soila’s ways. They say they do not get angry at the elephants because they respect Soila, who is like a mother to the elephants.

But some of the respect they have for her comes from shrewd customer service; herder’s complaints about elephant-killed cows get inspected the same day and payment is prompt. The lion people, complain the men, take forever. “If the person is good, it affects the animals under them. If the person is bad, it creates bad feelings.”

With everyone’s speeches completed, Soila produces an envelope containing cash. The men cannot read or write; they sign for their payment with thumb-prints. But they certainly know how to count money.

Back in the national park we encounter a large herd of elephants commuting out of the swamp toward the hills outside the park where they spend the nights, marching across plains lit now in gold-slanted sunlight.

We watch one family lingering in a deep, lushly vegetated spring-fed pool, blowing water and rolling like hippos while hundreds of other elephants plod across the dusty plains. Maybe the reason is, they’re having too much fun to tear themselves away. After a while they move single file to a farther bank and emerge shiny and wet like autos from a carwash. The last to go in is still waiting on the bank with her baby. She is touching the water with her trunk but her baby is acting hesitant. Eventually the mother enters. The baby follows, getting alongside and wrapping her trunk around her mother’s tusks for support. The water floats the baby, and with her trunk the mother guides her child along.

In Roman times, elephants roamed Africa from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope. They were soon hunted out of North Africa. In 1800, an estimated 26 million still inhabited most of the continent.

Now, shrunk from perhaps 90 percent of their former range by sprawling human populations and suffering relentless killing, elephant numbers are down to well under half a million—a drop of 98 percent since just 1800.

And they’re now declining at the worst-ever rate of loss, as ivory poachers are killing elephants by the tens of thousands annually for the insatiable Chinese market.

Why now? Because in 2008, the same authority (CITES) that had implemented a ban on ivory in 1990 allowed stockpiled ivory to be sold to China. This opened the floodgates for smuggling and laundering. Now 80-90 percent of ivory sold in China is from elephants illegally killed.

CITES did this. CITES is to blame. And China’s track record on wildlife trafficking—tigers, rhino horns, turtles, shark fins, etc. etc., is abysmal. And to a newly affluent Chinese middle class, ivory carvings are wildly popular. Ivory is popular in other countries too. Thailand earlier this month declared that ivory would become illegal—but gave no indication of when. In Africa, enforcement is weak and many corrupt officials profit. China could declare ivory illegal tomorrow. But the government of China profits.

CITES could also reinstate the ban on ivory trade. But they don’t want to. In early March, CITES delegates convened in Bangkok actually voted down a proposal by Kenya and Burkina Faso to include a wider group of nations in a pledge not to sell ivory stockpiles before 2016.

It’s quite possible that at the present rate, Africa could lose essentially all its elephants in 10 years. There are simply not enough elephants to withstand the demand.

So if you’re into what’s happening with elephants, here are two things worth watching:

First is an MSNBC panel on the elephant genocide: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/02/19/blood-ivory/

And—don’t miss John Heminway’s National Geographic film and special, “Battle for the Elephants,” on PBS and available whole and in part in various places on the Web. Everyone should see it. Search the Web for it.

Thanks to the Amboseli Trust for Elephants for exceptional kindness in getting me into the world of Amboseli and its elephants. Hugs to the strong-women geniuses Soila Sayialel, Katito Sayialel, and Vicki Fishlock. And a salute to Cynthia Moss.

For putting Humpty Dumpty together again, over and over, thanks to the Sheldrick Trust.

To the elephants themselves, as with their conversations that we cannot hear but can sometimes feel vibrating in our chest, I offer something without words, from deep within, hoping that they will somehow feel it.

But it will take more than good wishes, in this withering time, to keep them.

It will take voices and votes, words, politics, pressure, and dollars. I’ll do my best there, and I encourage others to join in.

In Kenya, I thank and support Save the Elephants, Big Life Foundation, Amboseli Trust for Elephants, and the Sheldrick Trust.

There is so much to do. There is so much at stake. Please do a little; it adds up. The outcry is beginning to be heard and felt.

Tim

On my last afternoon with the strange and wonderful creatures we call “elephants,” but who are their own beings, we found a couple of bulls so breathtakingly enormous that I actually did not think there were surviving males so old and carrying such prodigious ivory.

One of them was named Tim, whose reappearance after many weeks was a great relief to the researchers Katito Sayialel and Vicki Fishlock, who know and love him and fear for his life in a time of rampant poaching.

At the other end of the life-journey spectrum, I could not help laughing at the antics of many babies born in an unprecedented baby-boom. Following a deadly 2009 drought that killed hundreds of elephants and thousands of other animals, many female elephants who lost babies in that drought came synchronously into estrous. And when rain returned, so did new life within.

As Vicki Fishlock and I followed a herd of several families from the daytime haunts of a major wetland into the bush and hills where they spend nights, one particularly playful little jumbo was a bit obsessed with the butt of the baby ahead. Good friends, obviously.

Enormous male with female

Tim

Today the staff of Save the Elephants and the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund sponsored a trip to bring kids from the nearby village of Attan into Samburu Reserve to see elephants.

Most, if not all—including the teacher—had never seen an elephant, even though they live only about 20 miles from here.

Having fun with an elephant collar.

I had driven past the village a few days ago. The people live in very rudimentary houses and huts. Ike Leonard, one of the people from our group who went to the village to help fetch the kids, shared his photo of their schoolroom: termite-eaten wood walls, dirt floors, and simple tables that serve as group “desks.” Yet in the kids’ smiles is a lesson about appreciation for all of us.

Attan school by Ike Leonard.

They spent a while watching wild animals and saw lots of elephants. At the river they got treated to seeing elephants giving themselves mud baths. Then they came to the research camp for lunch and a film about elephant poaching. Among many other things, it showed a poacher who’d just been killed by the Kenya Wildlife Service. This is a rough place.

One thing that was striking to me was how skinny these kids are. Legs like sticks. The woman from Oxford who works on outreach in villages, Lucy King, says the one meal they get at school is all the food many of them have. There is no free education past grade 8 and almost none of the families have any money for more schooling.

During the film the kids ate snacks. When they ate their snacks they just threw all the wrappers and containers on the floor around them, even though they were indoors at the time. They seem to have no concept of litter. I guess if you have no food at home, snack wrappers aren’t a problem you’re accustomed to having.

I watched wild elephants mating today. I don’t know about you, but—first time for me.
I’m in Kenya working on a new book about the lives of animals.

Elephants have a unique mating system. First of all, females live together in families: a matriarch, her grown daughters, and all their kids. Males live in loose groups of males, or wander around on their own. Males don’t live in families.

Males don’t usually start trying to breed until they’re in their 20s. A weird thing happens. Older, higher ranking males, usually at least in their 30s, go into a period of heightened sexual appetite and aggressiveness called “musthe.” Male elephants in musthe are a little like male deer in “rut.” But deer all come into breeding readiness at the same time. With elephants, there is no way to predict which males will be in musthe or when. Males not in musthe would happily mate. But musthe males are bossy and aggressive, and—females prefer them.

Females mature around age 13, and then go into estrus for about 3 or 4 days. Almost every time they go into estrus, they conceive. They are pregnant for 2 years. About 2 years after giving birth, they go into estrus again, then they are pregnant for two more years while still nursing the last calf. (If they have a surviving baby, they keep nursing it for about 4 years.) In other words, they are ready to mate for only about 3 to 4 days every 4 to 5 years.

So when a female is ready, males are excited and there is a lot of competition.

Males in musthe walk around visiting different families, streaming fluid from the glands at the temples that both sexes have. (Both sexes stream from those glands when there is heightened emotion or excitement of any kind—a little like having sweating armpits on the side of your face, I guess). They also dribble urine constantly which broadcasts their status—you can smell it; it smells a bit like cat pee—and their penis appears greenish.

Researchers only figured this all out for African elephants in the 1970s. At first they thought the males were sick; they were calling the whole event, which can last a few weeks, “green penis disease.”

So, the musthe males go all around sniffing the air and sniffing the herds for estrus females. They walk up to adult females and instead of saying, “What’s your sign?,” they touch their trunk tip to her vulva, have a sniff, and often put the trunk into their mouths to test the taste.

This forward familiarity disturbs the ladies not in the least and they take it literally in stride, walking or feeding the whole time as if nothing is going on. Elephants are in many ways like humans, but there are limits to the comparison. Or at least, to the etiquette.

If a female is in estrus, various males will follow her and her family along. If a “musthe bull” arrives he will bully all rivals away and guard the estrus female. She will seem to be quite attracted to the musthe bull.

Now, today, it turned out that a musthe bull and several other bulls showed up among some ladies we were watching. Two families called the Zodiacs and the Rivers were mingling. Mingling families are called “bond groups” and are often relatives from families that have grown and split over decades of time.

Anyway, by watching the males we eventually realized that both Taurus Zodiac and Yangtze Rivers were in estrus. I know their names because I’m staying at the Save the Elephants field camp, and graduate student Shifra Goldenberg can recognize hundreds of elephants by sight.

First, a male called Bigfoot started chasing Taurus. Usually the game is that if a suitably grown-up bull catches up to a female in estrus and lays his trunk along her back, she stops and they mate. But Taurus must be just coming into estrus and didn’t seem ready. Or maybe she just didn’t want to mate with Bigfoot. When Bigfoot caught up to her and laid his trunk along her back, fair and square, she kept running. He was not pleased, and he came running alongside and looked like he was going to shove her with his tusks. But instead, he just roared in frustration, and broke off the chase.

Then Suzuki chased Taurus, with exactly the same response and result.

Then a musthe bull, who doesn’t seem to be in the database of known bulls, chased both those males away. There were about a dozen bulls around, all told, and all the females and bulls were all excited and running around and trumpeting. It’s called, “mating pandemonium.”

The boys got so carried away, they lost track of Taurus, whom I last saw traveling east. They all put their trunks up like periscopes, “looking” for the scent.

It was only then that we realized that Yangtze was also in estrus. The unknown musthe bull caught up to her and she let him mount.

Photo by Shifra Goldenberg

Everyone seemed to get very quiet. The other bulls looked on in awe, transfixed. Mating lasted about two minutes.

After that, everyone calmed down and got back to resting—they must have exerted a lot of energy running around in the tropical noonday heat—and eating.

And we left, knowing that this excitement will be going on repeatedly for a few days.

Researchers are trying to build an “alarm collar.” It’s a new kind of collar that can show if an elephant is up, down, or running. They hope to eventually use that information to more quickly dispatch rangers to try to catch poachers before they get too far.

Today, in the course of developing a book about the lives of animals, I accompanied researchers from Save the Elephants, Oxford University, and the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund, and veterinarians from the Kenya Wildlife Service as we put a test model of one of those collars on an elephant in Samburu Game Reserve, Kenya.

Putting on the collar. Photo by Carl Safina.

Hundreds of elephants use the reserve. They live in dozens of family groups. Elephant family groups are pretty stable over decades—an older mature female who is the matriarch and leader, her daughters, and all their juvenile children. But increasingly, the family groups are shattering as poachers kill matriarchs and many others, leaving wandering orphans trying to join remaining groups.

Last night we discussed which elephants would be good candidates for the test. No matriarchs, because on rare occasions, an elephant dies from the tranquilizing drug, and matriarch knowledge and leadership are simply too important to the entire family to risk. A young adult female from a well-known group that tends to stay on the reserve is a good candidate. The researchers have named all the adults in all the families that regularly use the reserve. So after some discussion, they put several names on a list.

At dawn we left the Save the Elephants camp in several vehicles and fanned out, looking for elephants. The idea was to find them early as they were coming downslope from where they’ve been sleeping, before they got near the river. We didn’t want a darted elephant going down in the water. And because a flood more than a year ago washed out a bridge that hasn’t been rebuilt, we didn’t want a darted elephant to cross the river, where we would not be able to follow or administer the antidote.

We found one group two miles from the river. This family is named The Winds. They were on a fast walk to water, and by the time the veterinary truck arrived, they were too close to the water. And in fact, they plunged in, drank, and crossed.

About an hour later we found another group, The Artists. They’d already been to the river, come back up on our side, and were feeding placidly. The researchers are incredibly expert at identifying several hundred elephants by the pattern of nicks and tears in their ears, and within The Artists, an adult female named Flaubert was on the list.

Because the process poses risks to the elephant, the scientists are always tense about darting them. When the dart hit her rump, she suddenly put her head up, trying to figure out what just happened. This mildly alarmed her calf and the alarm spread through the family. They started to move away from the vehicles.

Flaubert began lagging. Her calf was keeping up with the others. When she went down and lay on her side, we surrounded her with the vehicles. By the time her family had turned around to see what was wrong with her, we were already there and chased them off.

No one likes this work. It’s stressful for the elephants and the researchers. No one likes bothering them, and the risks of things going wrong make the whole darting procedure a fraught affair.

But this time it went perfectly. Forty minutes after we darted her, she had her collar on and had rejoined her family group and her calf.

Up and wearing her collar. Photo by Carl Safina.

Over the next couple of weeks, researchers will use the collar’s signals to find her, then they’ll video her activities and see if the information from the test collar is correctly informing them of what she is doing.

The hope is that this will help in the fight against poaching, but it’s a long-term strategy in an emergency situation. About 30 elephants from this population have been killed in the last two months.

The new kind of collar may help locate poachers. But to save elephants, conservationists and researchers will have to use every available strategy, from new technology to community outreach to international diplomacy.

When we left The Artists, Flaubert and her calf were in the river together with other family members, drinking peacefully.

Carl Safina at Sheldrick Trust.

One of the Trust’s keepers comes to me. “You Carl?,” he asks in a near-whisper. “When the elephants leave the tourist area, follow me.”

I am in Kenya walking in the bush, researching a new book on the lives of animals. Young, orphaned elephants surround me. They are moving and munching, moving and munching. “So, we will follow,” says Julius Shivegha in a gentle voice.

The mission here: bring these elephants from near-death to weaning, then to move them to a half-way facility in Tsavo National Park. There, over remarkable weeks, the orphans will go on daily walks that will switch from keeper-led to keeper-followed, until the orphans begin drifting and sifting into the wild elephant community, begin staying out nights, and eventually achieve full integration and the social interdependence that typifies normal elephant independence.

Many of the wild elephants they will meet are themselves graduates of this very project who visit regularly. The graduated orphans often welcome the newcomers. In Tsavo’s famed vastness live thousands of elephants as wild as any anywhere. And as threatened. Poaching is a problem there as everywhere. Nothing’s guaranteed.

Here, starting as one brown mass, two dozen elephant orphans fan further into the bush. Munching. One of these orphans was two weeks old when found with his wounded mother in Samburu. After being shot, she’d escaped poachers. But she was dying. After veterinarians spent a couple of days trying unsuccessfully to stabilize her, they euthanized her. The baby came to the orphanage.

Now nine months old, Barsilinga walks over and stops next to me and Julius. He reaches his tiny trunk up to Julius’s mouth. Julius takes it and obliges, blowing into it playfully. Barsilinga lets his little trunk go completely limp, the elephant equivalent of a puppy rolling over so you can rub its belly. In response, Julius rubs Barsilinga’s trunk vigorously between his hands, like a baker forming a piece of dough into a baguette.

Julius and Barsilinga. Photo by Carl Safina.

Because he was so young when he was found, Barsilinga’s the most confiding of the orphans here. Often when I turn around, Barsilinga is right next to me or, more accurately, right next to Julius, who I am next to.

Quanza comes by. Her story had moved me to tears even before I’d arranged this trip. Photographer Nick Brandt had made a stunning portrait of Quanza’s whole family, the “Q” family of famed Amboseli Park. The photo had made it into the New York Times. In the image, the dynasty stands magnificently, lined up behind the wise old matriarch Qumquat, one of the best-known elephants in Amboseli region. Twenty-four hours after Brandt made the photo, poachers killed the whole family and hacked open their faces for their tusks. All except little Quanza here.

At more than a year old at the time of the attack, Quanza’s mind was formed enough to bear the imprint of the terror and confusion. That was just three months ago.

In an orphan’s eye. Photo by Carl Safina.

“She is still very agitated,” says Julius. And she shows it by being pushy, shoving her weight around. Quanza butts little Lamoyian, who bellows in surprise. “Don’t push the baby!,” Julius sternly admonishes with a wagging finger. Julius speaks directly into Quanza’s ear like giving a directive to a child that has misbehaved in public. With his hand he steers her head away from the littler elephant.

And like some kind of odd new pastoralists, like shepherds in a time when all nature is crying out, we step along protectively with our elephantine flock, moving farther up the hill.

Munch. Rip. Munch. Rip. They eat continually. Think Jurassic Park, but warm-blooded.

Julius gently pulls bits of grass, delivering small bunches into Barsilinga’s swinging little trunk. I scratch the baby’s side and press my hand against his ribs, and he sends a rumble vibrating up through my arm. I slide my hand alongside his head, under his folded ear. It’s warm under there.

Kenya 1; Visiting the Sheldrick Trust Part One

Elephants orphaned by poaching. Photo by Carl Safina.

Today in the course of researching a new book on the lives of animals, I visited the famed elephant orphanage at the Sheldrick Trust. I got a privileged view.

There are three basic problems creating orphan elephants at an escalating rate: exploding human populations across Africa (as in other impoverished places) have eliminated elephants from many countries. Everywhere elephants still exist, humans are pushing elephants into tighter quarters. Human population growth is the main problem, and Kenya’s is growing rapidly. Relatedly, reserves and national parks are seldom large enough to contain elephant herds. Most herds cross in and out of protected boundaries. Outside, they run into new farms with irresistible crops, new settlements on traditional elephant migration routes, and angry, threatened villagers. Conflicts turn deadly for both elephants and humans. Third, increasing wealth in China has brought an insatiable demand for the elephants’ long incisor teeth that we call tusks. As you know, the substance they’re made of is called ivory.

Beautiful when carved, almost every piece of ivory has come from an elephant killed illegally. Prices have never been higher, and elephant poaching is now out of control. In many countries, corrupt officials are involved. In some, armies of rebel soldiers, or even armies of the regular government, are being sent across borders with modern military weapons to slaughter elephants to raise cash to fuel more fighting. Anti-poaching units are finding themselves outgunned. Poachers have hunted down and killed anti-poaching rangers. Rumor is that some poachers may now be using silencers and night-vision equipment. It’s a nightmare scenario from the worst parts of the human mind, turned to deadly violence for nature and humans.

If you can put that out of your mind for a minute, the Trust is a delightful place. Not only is the compassion deeply touching and the baby elephants wonderful. But by saving and eventually re-wilding elephant orphans, the Trust also bears global witness for the holocaust bearing down on wild creatures, wild places, and especially elephants.

About a hundred tourists, almost all white, begin lining up along a rope bordering a patch of open ground. At the appointed time, a keeper in a green coat walks out of the bush followed single-file by about a dozen young elephants. The smallest, just waist-high, wears a blanket. The largest, whose shoulder is just above my eye-level, is about three years old and weighs an easy half-ton.

Other keepers are now manning two-dozen two-liter milk bottles. The milk disappears in great suckling chugs. All gone in a few seconds.

Nursing orphan elephant at the David Sheldrick Trust. Photo by Carl Safina.

While this is happening, one of the keepers give a long spiel about who they are, how they got here, ivory, and the severe new escalation in price, driven by demand in China. Overheard: A gray-haired man says to his wife, “How would China like it if Africans started coming to China and shooting their pandas?”