Be cautious. John Burnett’s terrible reporting for NPR on elephant poaching not too long ago set me ablaze. He fouled up the numbers completely, came from the wrong perspectives and reduced a complicated issue to hardly a cartoon.

PBS was just as bad, but had redeeming parts. The February production that included Aiden Hartley going undercover in Dar-es-Salaam to document that trade in illegal ivory was brilliant, but their numbers and back stories that introduced the stealth section were poor if not patently untrue.

So why am I directing you to another American public media production about animal poaching?

Because the synopsis presented over the weekend by reporters Frank Langfitt and Gregory Warner sounds good. Both reporters are more experienced than the reporters assigned to the elephant story.

Because many, many bloggers and experts – not just me – were highly critical of the elephant reporting by NPR and PBS earlier. Some of that noise had to get through.

Because basic facts, which have been buried in scandalization for years, are already out in the story and look good: In the whole summary, I did not hear once any reference to rhino horn being used as an aphrodisiac. It isn’t, but this reference has peppered stories of rhino poaching since time immemorial, a racist and horrible injustice to the bigger story.

Rhino horn is in demand — as with ivory — in Asia but for medicinal, holistic beliefs in its curative powers. Used for centuries as a fever reducer, newly rich Asians (mostly Vietnamese) buy tiny erasure-size blocks of compressed horn to cure everything from diabetes to hangovers.

For the poacher in East Africa, though, the main market is Yemen, Djibouti, Eritrea and thereabouts, where rich businessmen buy the horn to polish it as a dagger handle.

In the ATC story summary we heard this weekend, Langfitt and Warner conceded that even after poaching there are still enough rhino births annually to continue increasing the population.

(Media that they are, however, they’re unable to avoid teasing us with scandal, claiming that at current rates this will not be the case by 2017. I doubt that.)

And they have drilled into the attempts at real solutions, including horn cutting and controlled rhino farming and harvesting.

So unlike the huge bulk of elephant reporting these last several years which has been terribly incorrect, and of which NPR and PBS have contributed to messing up, this one might be different.

Stay tuned.

Think about that, please.

Yesterday, the Chinese actress Li Bingbing – who has 20 million followers and counting on her social media – made a highly public visit to an elephant orphanage in Nairobi and then called on her fellow Chinese to stop buying ivory.

She joins a growing list of Chinese celebrities aggressively supporting conservation issues, and it makes me so damn mad the way current media again and again is blaming the Chinese for a crisis they’ve also made up: elephant decline.

The same organization for which Bingbing is an honorary ambassador is also one of the few to use realistic numbers regarding elephants. You might have heard of this organization: the United Nations.

The press statement released with Bingbing’s conference referred to “data [that] shows that 17,000 elephants were illegally killed in 2011.”

Contrast that with CNN that described the “slaughter of elephants” at an “alarming rate” and blamed it on the Chinese.

As I’ve pointed out again and again in this blog, animal poaching is horrible. Using the UN’s numbers (see link to the report, below) there are probably a half million or more elephant in Africa, today, and a low estimate of their annual reproductive rate increases that population automatically by 25-35,000 annually.

There are too many elephant. Elephant/human conflict is Africa’s single-largest conservation problem. So even with the illegal poaching, the troublesome population is growing larger and larger every year.

And the notion that it is all due to the Chinese is racist.

Yes, most of the illegal ivory goes to Asia, but Asia is not China. There is huge market in Thailand almost equal to all of China, and another huge market in South Korea. Anyone ever talk about those countries? And a huge portion of the Chinese market comes in through Hong Kong, which is as little Chinese as possible. The next conduits are Indonesia and the Philippines.

But do we ever hear negative things about those capitalist ally mean guys?

This whole made-up story about the imminent doom of elephants is horrible enough in itself. The elephant problem is not with its likely demise, but with the demise of our entire conservation efforts in Africa as young populations of modern Africans get sick and tired of being stepped on by animals preserved for rich foreigners.

Go ahead and let the beast bulldoze your child’s primary school at night and decimate your watermelon crop, so that South African tourism chains can charge $800 per American per night to see them picking their teeth and wagging their tails the next morning.

Look folks, we’ve got to climb down from inaccurate media that’s turning real world conflicts into soap operas. I’m so exasperated not just with CNN, but a whole range of media, each one feeding on the American public’s craven need for apocalypse.

The best factual report about the elephant situation you can read by clicking here. Be patient and refresh your viewer often, because it’s a huge report with many charts and tables and it’s created for CITES by CITES and the UN. Unfortunately it’s skewed towards the apocalyptic angle, for political reasons anticipating the upcoming CITES battle about sales of regulated ivory. But its numbers are solid and absolutely support my ranting and raving.

It’s a real problem, but we aren’t thinking about it correctly or working to resolve it. We’re just using it to titillate us.

Get real. Thank you, Bingbing and UN.

I’ve written before how the current elephant poaching is being sensationalized by the media as something much larger than it really is. Elephant populations in almost every part of Africa continue to increase, even though poaching is also increasing.

This dynamic is quite different than in the 1980s. And the reason is simply that the scale of poaching then was exponential compared to now.

The near extirpation of the species then led to the world-wide CITES treaty which was instrumental in stopping, and reversing, the poaching.

Today’s poaching is different, but no less terrifying: Until recently, anyway, it was confined to individual bands of men – not corporately organized mobile slaughter houses. It was motivated by individuals’ survival, not market driven or as an OPEC hedge.

One or two tusks were hauled to local markets, not tons lifted by helicopters to Yemen. And the poachers are generally individuals who pocket the loot and disappear, not by organizations that return again and again to better their last bottom line.

But the increase in poaching – however slight compared to the 1980s – has been enough to stimulate the black market. And small-band, individual crime that characterizes the majority of elephant poaching today is transforming into something much worse in certain areas.

I only hope the telling of this story will not fuel the hype. Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times first reported the situation last September. Unfortunately the wider media took the sensitive report and exaggerated it, presuming what was happening in the jungles of The Congo was the same that was happening in Tanzania’s national parks.

It is the lazy inability by buzz-word, snapshot media to separate the two phenomenon that so disturbs me. And I continue to presume that the former situation described so well by Gettleman does not represent a significantly new threat to the species. And certainly the one-off poaching by ad hoc bans of survivalists doesn’t, either.

Nevertheless, a report we received this weekend from the famous primate researcher, Terese Hart from the depths of The Congo, suggests what Gettleman reported in September is increasing and spreading.

Hart describes with the courage of an MGM lion and in near legalistic detail how a convicted war criminal escaped poor detention and has organized a serious elephant poaching band in the depths of The Congo’s jungle where she works.

Everyone should read her blow-by-blow account: Click here.

The story illustrates the unsung courage of many local Africans wholly dedicated to conservation, of the potential effectiveness of The Congo government’s military (a story in itself), and how the wanton neglect of the developed world dumped weaponry into the hands of thugs.

Hart is a renowned researcher. She’s become now nothing less than a crusader, and many of us worry for her safety.

The sad fact of Hart’s story is that nothing is going to change unless major powers like the United States take ownership of their wanton neglect and aggressively begin cleaning up the loose weaponry of the world.

Simultaneously with powers like China aggressively stopping the trade in illegal ivory.

And until that action formula reaches The Congo, elephant may not be in as much danger as Terese Hart.

Newsweek’s article published tomorrow, disseminated this weekend by the Daily Beast, is the perfect example.

Margot Kaiser’s lengthy article might be considered detailed if it were not rife with so many inaccuracies.

To begin with she cleaves open the story suggesting few but her have ever seen the insides of the Tanzanian ivory warehouse. Local bloggers have been obtaining pictures of the ivory room for years.

That was the giveaway. Kaiser’s handling of the facts was treacherous, starting with her claims that elephant numbers were now “roughly half of what it was in the late 1970s.” The truth is that it’s impossible to say, because we can’t get good data, but a very good guess is that the numbers are closer to double today what they were during the nadir of elephant poaching in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Not half, double.

This is a very hard post to write, because elephant poaching is definitely out of hand and has become a global economic problem that is screaming for management. We mostly look to CITES, the excellent world trade treaty that legislates global laws against the sale of ivory. The problem today is enforcement of those global laws.

And that enforcement is not being helped by near hysterical stories like Margot Kaiser’s.

The problem with elephant and rhino poaching today is much different than when elephant really were threatened with extinction in the 1970s and 1980s.

And that’s the first problem. Even if we did absolutely nothing more to enforce laws against the sale of illegal ivory, elephant numbers would increase.

Tanzania has the worst elephant poaching problem in East Africa, today. I have yet to see a reputable NGO with an official number, but the media is passing around 10,000 elephant poached annually in Tanzania.

I doubt that. Charles Foley, the principal elephant researcher in East Africa, recently released his 2012 annual research report in which he states “many thousands of elephants” not tens of thousands are being poached. Moreover, Foley has documented the highest reproductive rate of elephants ever known in Tanzania to date, with upwards of 7% population increases being recorded in the north of the country year-to-year.

Foley’s assessment suggests that elephant numbers are increasing — at least in certain prime elephant habitats — faster than the increase in poaching.

Unlike the 1970s and 1980s, poaching today is mostly individualized, not corporate. It is worth it today to a small band of individuals to risk life and limb for the value they can get for a couple tusks sold on the black market.

Because the Asian market has exploded in demand as the area develops a middle class in old cultures that have revered ivory for millenia.

And at the same time elephant populations are being better conserved, so particularly in well protected areas their numbers are growing … maybe too fast.

Increased market demand combined with a larger supply …. well, you don’t have to be a rocket economist to figure that one out.

Yet the media’s hysteria is unbelievable. I just don’t get it. We need to look at this fascinating and organically destructive dynamic now happening in the world regarding ivory, but not scream at it.

The answer today, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, is to deal with the market demand, and there are promising developments, particularly in China, as its population becomes educated to the realities of African conservation.

Taobao, China’s Sears, has banned the sale of ivory products, which previously had been a maintstay of their household decorator market.

Americans like everything to be all or nothing, and that’s why calming down this conversation feels so perilous. I don’t want not to investigate and work towards a better balance with regards to elephant in Africa.

I just don’t want you to believe it’s apocalyptic, cataclysmic to the point we have to “act immediately” or lose everything. Today’s elephant problem is going to take a long time to solve because altering the free market takes time.

And that’s one of many points. We have the time, this time. We didn’t in the 1970s.

The journal Science is no teenage blog. The rigors of getting published in magazines of this caliber are legend, and the author, Dr. Nigel Stork, comes well credentialed. He’s the Deputy Director of the Griffith School of the Environment, not just one of Australia’s top schools but a global leader.

So what did Dr. Stork say? Something that alarms alarmists, that right now there’s no reason for alarm.

Stork’s comprehensive data study concluded that species are not going extinct as quickly as commonly thought. There is not, as Richard Leakey convinced me years ago, a Sixth Great Die-off happening, now.

Five times before Leakey’s pronouncement in the 1980s, Planet Earth has suffered a massive die-off of species. We know the reason for several of these, including the giant rock that pummeled Yucatan and accelerated the end of the dinosaur era. Another of the reasons millions of years before was when bubbles of deadly methane trapped deep within the earth were released by earthquakes.

While I can’t put my finger on any study suggesting otherwise, it really has been a widely accepted notion that if not an actual “Die-off” that we were losing species right left and center. Organizations such as Global Issues live not die by pronouncing organic holocaust.

Stork says stand back and take a deep breath. He’s not saying everything is as good as it should be, just that it isn’t as bad as popularly believed.

And to his credit he portends Armageddon if global warming isn’t curbed.

The article made me think about East Africa, of course. I thought of the several species of antelope that have gone extinct in my lifetime, the decline in lions, the ups and downs and right now downs of elephants, and the real loss of a number of smaller forest creatures.

Yet I then had to remind myself of how many new species have been discovered within that period. Now this isn’t like new births replacing deaths, of course. But it may indicate that a balance of sort exists that we were just ignoring.

It’s hard to accept that belief. When we get broadsided by Konza Cities and Mega Malls and highways through forests. But scientifically, it may just be true.

Conservation of known species is today a tremendous art and the technologies that have been employed to nurture our biodiversity are sometimes, well, extraordinary.

Take drones, for instance.

Now that the Somali war is winding down, what do you do (if you were Uncle Sam) with all those robotic airplanes flying all over the place? You start an internet campaign to raise money and buy one of them to fight rhino poaching!

And what a steal it was! The drone cost less than $40,000, but keep in mind how fast drone depreciate and this one had none of the bells and whistles of the better models, like missile launchers and laser sprays.

They weren’t particular about the color, either.

Kenya’s most successful rhino conservancy, Ol Pejeta, explained that the drone was purchased “used” from the U.S. company UASUSA Tempest, and that another U.S. company, Unmanned Innovation, will launch it and provide the ground-based monitoring equipment. No comments from these guys since they’re classified.

I’ve always felt that one of the best ways to justify wars is to give away a few bombs. Discreetly, of course.

Now though the campaign to raise enough money is done, Ol Pejeta will let you donate more and you might win the contest to NAME THE DRONE!

My #5 Top Story of 2012 is the complex and very sad chronicle of Africa’s big game under enormously new onslaught. To see a list of all The Top Ten, click here.

First, a little perspective. Elephant being the biggest and least manageable of Africa’s big wild animals are understandably the barometer of poaching in general, even though virtually all types of African animals are poached. But as goes GM, so goes the economy; the metrics of elephant poaching more or less represent poaching in general.

And lacking good statistics it remains fair to say that the poaching today is nowhere near as massive as it was in the horrible 1970s and 1980s when elephant were almost extirpated. There are still lots more elephant, today, than at the end of the 1980s.

I’m very disturbed, though, by how the media has exaggerated the situation. There’s no need for exaggeration. The truth is bad enough. But it results in the media totally ignoring some fabulous successes with anti-poaching, especially with quelling the market for ivory.

And I have previously brought up the very uncomfortable idea that poaching in East Africa is the same as culling in South Africa. This complex notion can, indeed, be argued that there’s no better possible situation than the status quo. That doesn’t make it right, by the way.

So while the quantitative problem of poaching today pales in comparison to the 1970s and 1980s, and the public has been unnaturally jigged up by sensational media in particular, the qualitative aspect of poaching today is, indeed, much worse than before.

There are two main differences with the decimation of elephant in the 1980s and today: today a lot of poaching is by individuals, or small bands of unorganized friends, in very ad hoc ways as opposed to the large corporate poaching of the past. Secondly, there’s every indication that poaching is being used as a politically global football fully open to bargaining.

The involvement often at the global level of very powerful institutions … like banks is new and horrifying. In America in particular the “lay-off more bank regulation” which has followed the cavity they caused in the global economic order is allowing the important and rich middlemen that transit the animal part from its home country to its market country to flourish.

And on the more patent political level, “national security” is becoming a determinate in establishing a de facto level of poaching rather than the moral argument which prevailed in the past, so that the previous presumption that elephant poaching was immoral is being usurped by the argument that it contributes to terrorism.

It’s unfortunate we don’t have good summary numbers. Asia, especially Thailand and India, and South Africa compile good numbers on elephant populations and poaching. But no one else does.

We can scrape up numbers for individual ecosystems, like the Serengeti, but even simply combining the Serengeti with its Kenyan neighbor, the Mara, grows difficult to impossible.

The main reason for this is that most African countries do not want researchers to know the real numbers.

But there are enough “scraped up” numbers, anecdotal reports, public scandals and especially confiscated attempts at ivory shipments to give us a reasonable view of what’s happening.

In the last few years Tanzania has hired and fired more wildlife officials and Ministers with wildlife portfolios than Liz Taylor did with husbands: Researchers as well as local Tanzanians are growing increasingly fed up with corruption and obfuscation.

Because while most of Africa’s elephant population is happening in Tanzania, so is it the pinnacle of East African safari tourism. There is less empathy locally in non-South Africa Africa for wild animals than from us, outside. But when considered in the context of tourism, there is widespread consensus that poaching is bad.

So why, then, is it getting worse?

My opinion is that the global economic recession is principally to blame, but not for the evident reasons you might think.

Africa did fairly well overall during the recession. As did Asia. But the five years since the market collapse have nonetheless massively impacted African and Asian economies, most notably by increasing the gap between rich and poor.

Huge numbers of Tanzanians, like huge numbers of Chineese, have become extraordinarily rich over the last five years. Even as Dar’s slums have exploded in size and China’s rural populations have suffered a decline in standard of living.

Asia and China in particular is the principal market for poached game, especially ivory. And East Africa and Tanzanian in particular is the principal source. It’s a marriage made in hell.

According to the African Wildlife Trust, “The vast majority of the illegal ivory …is flowing to China… China’s economic boom has … push[ed] the price of ivory to a stratospheric $1,000 per pound on the streets of Beijing.”

We don’t know for sure how this devolves to the individual poacher trying to sell his illegal cut on the streets of Morogoro, but the best estimates is that a typical 20-kilo tusk nets the poacher 2-3 years annual wage. And most elephants have two tusks.

In an economic environment where the untrained, unskilled adult is struggling with farming in climate change and squeezed by increasing dry goods prices, the allure of poaching is real. Combine this with a growing sentiment among urbanized people worldwide that there are too many wild animals, a market in China controled by individuals with no empathy whatever for big game preservation, corrupt local officials on the take, and you have all the ingredients for tacit acceptance of this otherwise illegal trade.

So that’s my take: bad economic times with rich Asians richer wanting to buy ivory, and rich Tanzanians richer wanting to broker it. And a rapidly growing Africa that simply has too many elephant.

What to do?

Groan if you will, but there are no simple answers. We’ve entered an extraordinarily complex era in African development, particularly in East Africa. Increased poaching is a part of this, but understanding that as a complicated, nettled component of contemporary African society much less global capitalism is necessary before anything at all can be done.

Yesterday in Australia she veered the topic away from the more weighty subject of Australia’s role in the world to antipoaching, as America’s acting ambassador in Nairobi opened a fat wallet to the Kenya Wildlife Service.

I think it all well and good that we Americans support Kenyan anti-poaching efforts instead of paying down the deficit or increasing funds for green energy.

Really?

No. And that’s not the point. Anti-poaching is not normally in the portfolio of America’s Secretary of State. Remember Hamas and Israel are bombing each other, Iran is boiling hot, and New York is floating away.

There’s more to Hillary’s campaign than to save animals.

In September the outstanding Africa correspondent for the New York Times in Africa, Jeffrey Gettleman, reported that terrorists on the run (probably from Obama’s special forces) were slaughtering animals and selling them for their operational funds.

Obama had earlier through the Dodd-Frank Act and other clever means dried up the main source of African terrorist funds: Those black dollar bills in the millions if not billions were amassed through Rwanda’s brokering of black market precious metals like coltan which Apple, Intel and Sony need to make things like Xbox, Droids and iPads.

Unable to sell coltan on the black market, more sophisticated terrorist groups started to call in the favors from the Rwandan government, that had depended upon their trouble-making in the DRC to complement their own draconian police measures at home against Hutus.

So the U.S. and France quietly started to squeeze Rwanda by unmasking its decade-old support for DRC terrorist groups as if it were news. It worked. New and sharper eyes from the United Nation began to monitor Rwanda in The Congo closely and after a few diplomatic swipes back and forth, Rwanda started to close the vaults.

Further afield funding for the central African terrorists was available from the big guys in Yemen and Somalia. More difficult but possible. Until Obama quietly nudged then aggressively supported the Kenyans who bombed the hell out of the banks (and everything else) in Kismayo until the city fell in October.

What’s left? Well, we had to get the election out of the way. And then:

Elephants.

China’s growing influence in Africa has been going on for nearly two decades, and right now there are Chinaman everywhere in Africa. They come to build roads and dams, to manage hydroelectric plants and all to help China get oil. But in their spare time they broker illegal ivory.

This rather incidental avocation has been growing for years, and of course will never reach the level of brokering illegal coltan or funneling in laundered millions from Saudia through the Kismayo National Bank.

But it’s all that’s left.

War on terror going well (if secretly).
Sources of terror funding drying up (as Kismayo, Somali, the bank deposit for the continent, falls to the Kenyans).
New Chinese leadership announced (at elaborate parties using ivory decanters).
America’s presidential election finally over.

Hillary announces an anti-poaching campaign.

I’m not making light of this. Just sense.

In addition to simple inaccuracies, my main criticism was that the two stories filed by John Burnett were grossly narrow, cherry picking scandalous components while ignoring an essential bigger picture for cheap and trivial stuff that gets quicker attention.

The increase in elephant poaching in East Africa, most severely but not exclusively in Tanzania, has been on the rise for 4-5 years. It’s not new and it’s not suddenly greater than a few months or years before.

Burnett’s lead story suggested it was something relatively new and newly urgent, and so he neatly avoided the essential and more complex history of what has actually been happening.

This is my sixteenth blog about elephant poaching since March. Simply type “elephant” in the search box to the right for those stories. Journalists from Reuters, the New York Times and AFP have filed just as many over that same period.

This is because as Burnett said poaching is increasing almost as rapidly as in the catastrophic years of the 1970s-80s when 95% of Kenya’s elephants were wiped out and nearly 60% of Tanzania’s. It has not reached that level — nowhere near that level — and many other factors are considerably different.

Let’s start with the numbers, because Burnett has some quite wrong. I tread very cautiously and with some hesitation, because the last thing I want to do is reduce concern for a very serious East African problem.

As I’ve written again and again, the “elephant problem” is central to East Africa’s wilderness and economy. Poaching is absolutely one of the most serious problems facing East African society. But we do our cause harm with untruths.

“Perhaps 70,000 to 80,000 elephants roam” Tanzania Burnett claims.

On January 15, 2011, The 5-year Tanzania Elephant Management Plan spear-headed by such prominent and widely respected researchers as Charles Foley put Tanzania’s elephant population at around 110,000.

How many elephant have actually been poached since then, augmented by a record number of births due to good rains, is hard to estimate accurately, but the overall population is certainly higher than Burnett speculates.

Burnett says that the 70-80,000 number is “perhaps a quarter” of the continent’s population (280-320,000). This is widely inaccurate. Most recent estimates are very much higher. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature puts the continent’s total number at 472-690,000.

Burnett quotes a former conservationist in Tanzania as saying that 30 elephants daily are being poached. Using a conservative estimate that each elephant killed carries at least 100 pounds in total ivory from two tusks, that would mean there was more than 500 tons of ivory poached out of Tanzania each year, and that’s ludicrous.

Shippers of the most creative sort could not conceal even a fraction of that.

These are not minor inaccuracies. The “carrying capacity” of any environment for managed big game depends on precise numbers, not widely speculated ones. Burnett’s high-balling his numbers might enhance the urgency of his report, but it distracts us from possible solutions.

I wonder if as in our politics and grocery shopping, Americans just can’t be mobilized without exaggeration. It’s a sad commentary that NPR has fallen into this trap.

Burnett’s second story was better. He interviewed a poacher.

The story demonstrates that quite unlike the 1970-80s corporate poaching with Sikorsky helicopters using everything from AK47s to bazookas and then chartered ocean liners, some of the poaching today is an individual criminal phenomenon. And like so much crime everywhere in the world, its principal motivation is poverty.

That makes it much less effective and much harder to remedy.

Burnett rightly puts the onus for poaching on Asian market demand that we all agree has been sparked by economic growth in China. The evidence for this is overwhelming. But I’m very disappointed he didn’t describe the exciting new efforts by Chinese and Chinese surrogates to change this behavior.

It means that even the villain knows he’s a villain, and that’s a real start.

Finally, Burnett totally ignored one of the essential if perhaps not the central cause of poaching, today: There are too many elephants.

There are too many elephants not just in Tanzania, but throughout Africa and even in Asia.

This fact is hard to digest. It doesn’t mean there are more elephants than there once were. But for the existing diminished habitat, and in terms of human/elephant conflict, there are simply too many.

And that’s the real problem. It means poachers often get a pass because local officials actually appreciate what they’re doing, because farms are saved and school buildings don’t have to be rebuilt so often.

You won’t hear this from an elephant researcher standing over a carcass recently poached. And you won’t get a Tanzanian official to say as much to a westerner writing an article about poaching. It takes a more cautious and deliberate reporter than Burnett.

The story of elephants, their majesty, their near decimation in the 1970-80s, and now their perplexingly big problem in rapidly developing African societies is one of the most important stories in East Africa, today. It represents almost all of East Africa’s problems and probably contains some of their solutions. It’s as much historical as contemporary.

But jigging up the story with exaggeration while neglecting central facts won’t help. It needs as much attention from Rachel Maddow as the Tea Party.

The majority of African Greys kept in the United States may have actually been born in captivity. In a sense they were manufactured to be pets; they’ve never soared over Africa’s great forests.

But be that as it may, are you sure that your bird was captive bred? And even if it truly was, do you realize that your keeping the bird in a cage is contributing to its extinction in the wild, where it much more truly belongs?

There are many as 30,000 loving owners of the Grey Parrot (Psittacus erithacus) in the United States, which for the first time this year was listed as “vulnerable” by the scientific organization (IUCN) used to determine which animals are in danger of extinction.

If the decline in the African Grey Parrot continues, and if the IUCN ultimately classifies it as “endangered” and if the CITES convention then adopts its recommendation, international trade in the bird would stop.

But the politics involved in this would be extraordinary. So there is real concern that at the point the bird is classified as threatened, it will be too late.

The IUCN explains the rapid decline in Africa’s most famous parrot because “It is one of the most popular avian pets in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East due to its longevity and unparalleled ability to mimic human speech.”

IUCN says that over the last 30 years “a million birds” may have been removed from the wild in Africa. Most of these are removed illegally, although a good portion have been captured on licenses given by corrupt African governments.

The market in the U.S. has existed for decades, but a new and vibrant market in China has also emerged as a result of China’s increased wealth. And unlike the U.S. and Europe, there are no laws in China that restrict the importation of wild birds.

Today, an African Grey Parrot in the U.S. sells for an average of $1,000. Good statistics are not available, but successful breeding of captive African Greys is a very lucrative business. Reputable companies like PetSmart routinely sell them, and eBay and Amazon both offer them.

But since there is no exact certification of what is truly a captive-bred bird, it’s likely today that many are illegal imports.

Many of these birds are smuggled out of Africa through poorly monitored ports like Windhoek, Namibia. Last week the Namibian Avicultural Association adopted new rules to try to stem the flow of illegal birds through the country.

The association claims that bird dealers in the country “do not seem to know that buying a parrot without [proper certification] may represent a bird that has been illegally caught in the wild.”

Like outright poaching, I can sympathize with Africans desperate to make a day’s wage, and capturing birds isn’t as difficult as it seems. On the Windhoek black market as throughout Africa, National Geographic estimates the poacher receives about $30 a bird.

The African middleman who pays the poachers smuggles the birds out of the country in horrible conditions. The majority die in crowded and dirty little containers that may have squashed hundreds of birds. The African middleman likely earns around $50 per bird.

The birds that survive the smuggling are taken by wholesalers in the U.S., Europe and China that launder their origin and sell them to companies like PetSmart. The wholesaler probably makes $300-500 per bird.

So while I can empathize with the poacher, it’s not possible to condone the knowingly illegal work of the middleman.

Ultimately, this horrendous trade will stop only when the market stops. Without a listing by CITES as endangered that’s impossible in places like China.

But at here at home and in Europe, let common sense prevail. Get a dog.

Jeffrey Gettleman described in exquisite detail typical of his outstanding reporting the rapid increase in elephant poaching in remote places like The Congo.

It was an excellent piece of journalism, mainly because Gettleman pulled no punches. He let others explain his conclusion that the culprits are existing governments and renegade militias, and that the problem wouldn’t exist if China weren’t getting rich.

Unfortunately Americans often don’t read that far into an article, and when reduced by the NPR report this morning, some of these very important conclusions were terribly skimmed over.

I often feel ashamed as an American of our knee-jerk reactions to animal cruelty, for example, when it prompts us to greater action than people cruelty in Africa. And this is the perfect example.

Read Gettleman through to the end, don’t listen to NPR, and then think about it carefully.

Elephants today are nowhere near as threatened as they were in the 1980s when selling ivory in most parts of the world was legal. Then the only impediment to wiping out the species was the impoverished and usually corrupt African government that made it illegal to steal ivory from their wilderness.

But once out, the free market reigned most cruelly. And it was easy to get out. The wife of the president of Kenya, the country that suffered the most rapid decline in elephants, was a kingpin in the market. And there were no extradition treaties for ivory.

Ivory has been considered an exceptionally precious commodity in Asia for literally thousands of years, and that hadn’t changed in the 1980s and hasn’t changed, now. It’s an exceptional media that allows intricate sculpture yet holds its form through unusual strength and goes through subtle and beautiful color changes with age.

Like so much in nature, it is so much more beautiful than anything synthetic.

Tanzanian researcher Charles Foley also argues that the OPEC oil crisis of the 1980s prompted Mideasterners to cache their funds in durable commodities like ivory, and to be sure, many of the poaching syndicates were ultimately traced to the Mideast. That was the middleman to Asia.

The problem wasn’t solved until the world came together and created a global treaty that banned the sale of ivory, CITES. It is that treaty still in force today that is no longer functioning.

And the reasons it’s no longer functioning reveal a deep human neglect that is much more profound than neglecting to protect an animal. There are two equally culpable parties: China and The West.

CHINA’s BLAME
Hillary Clinton is today in China making the case for the first: CITES was successful because China and all of Asia (at the time, critically important Hong Kong) was on board. Today, China is ignoring CITES.

And the market for ivory in China is unbelievable. There are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions more rich Chinese than existed in the 1980s, and as their own economy falters and the world seems momentarily less secure, their passion for ivory has renewed geometrically.

In the 1980s ivory rose to $100/kilo. Today in China carved ivory trades as high as $1000/ounce.

When there is such an incredible demand, where an ounce of a product that comes in 100-pound tusks is greater than the average annual income of an African living in central Africa jungles, imagine the temptation to kill the thing.

China’s inability to curb its effete greed, its inability to develop an art culture that doesn’t lay waste a living thing, is essential to understanding this dilemma.

WEST’s BLAME
The West’s culpability derives mostly from its obsession with terrorism and it is a sweet-and-sour story to be sure.

To our credit America is eking away much of the under-the-table and immoral politics of our past history with Africa, and so is much of Europe. The new Dodd-Frank regulations of how American corporations can obtain precious earth metals from Africa has strangled many African warlords. Reparations by several European countries for the most patent sins of colonialism has reversed a century of denial.

But our continued military involvement in Africa, escalated by Obama especially in Somalia and the central African region, has in its military successes turned warlords and militias on the run into elephant killers.

Starved of precious metals like coltan, turned tail by increasing military losses, African guerillas like the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army are now fueling their dwindling operations with the ivory trade. And with the market so ready, it’s an easy call for them.

And worse, the ostensible victors in these military skirmishes, especially the Ugandans, have now been documented by Gettleman of using the military equipment given to them by America to slaughter elephants.

I have no doubt that Obama and his advisers believe that the military successes in central Africa and Somalia are worth the loss of elephant.

So do I.

And that’s the profound understanding you’ve got to acquire from this complicated story. Be patient. Condemn the elephant slaughter, support Hillary in stiff arming China to return with fervor to CITES, but don’t do anything else.

Don’t send a new $100 to Save the Elephants, because you believe the organization which does fantastically good work in Kenya can save an elephant from the Lord’s Resistance Army in central Africa selling to a fanatical China. It can’t.

What will impede the current slaughter is reducing terrorism, making China adhere to CITES, reducing the market value of ivory to something fathomable vis-a-vis an African’s annual wage. And these solutions aren’t easy ones and there is no better way to effect them than to support an American foreign policy on the right track for the first time in a generation.

Nor will elephant poaching be stopped by more guns in anti-poaching, as Gettleman brilliantly reports. It will stop in stages as man’s inhumanity to man stops. It will stop as slowly as greed is reversed and compassion grows.

And plausibly, that might never happen. But if we lose central African elephants we might gain an equally valuable lesson: no animal will be saved in this world, before man saves himself.