No one did anything about it. He was killed because he was known for being an ivory dealer. This also ties into his motivation for being a part of the project. He saw this as an opportunity to show what his life is actually like and embrace some of the realities that a lot of other work had skimmed over or ignored.
X is an opportunist. He is a manipulator. We were traveling around together, and I wanted to get some shots of elephants. I asked him where we could go to get some basic footage. I said that any time tourists go to conservancies, they have to pay a few hundred dollars. But X insisted, and when we got to the gate, X jumped out and he goes up to the man at the gate and talks to him for a few minutes. He comes back in the car and the gate just opens up and we drive through.
I asked how he convinced them not to charge a white guy for access. Then there are the rangers, who are charged with protecting elephants. How much do rangers earn, and how much could a successful poacher earn? You explore the incredible financial hardship that the guys who are doing noble work have to endure. There were times when they were paid on time and times where a month, two months, or three months would go by without pay.
None of them feel like they can rely on that. So they find other creative ways to make the money they need to feed their families, mainly by taking bribes. One incredibly powerful scene was X, Lukas, and Asan watching a government-sponsored, televised mass burn of confiscated elephant tusks. They look at that as a sign of deep international pressure.
They understand that a lot of international funding came in to support that act and destroy all the wealth that they have risked their lives to collect. Then they watch their president destroy it all in front of them. What that did to morale was insane. Did X ever look into the future and imagine what might happen if he and the other poachers were so successful the elephant population disappeared?
It was very hard to think of them as monsters. I was hoping for a clear answer, for a way to tell people what to do. The deeper I went into this world, the more I realized just how complicated it is, and how warped our perception is of the issue. What do you do with the ivory? Do you sell it and then use that money to conserve more? In addition to exhaustively cross-checking their earlier work, Schlossberg, Chase, and co-author Robert Sutcliffe added one new element.
To test for other possible causes of elephant deaths, they studied the regions immediately surrounding the five poaching hot spots to ascertain whether they differed from the hot spots in terms of available food for elephants, drought conditions, elephant densities, and numbers of people. What they found was that the non-poached areas generally had poorer food supplies and less water. Elephant densities were roughly comparable, and there were more people in the areas outside the poaching hot spots.
Overall, the team estimated that between and the number of elephant carcasses in Botswana increased by percent. Some of the increase may have been from natural causes, including a country-wide drought a few years ago, Schlossberg says.
Elephant numbers stayed roughly stable from to But that in itself is problematic, he explains, because elephant populations are expected to increase a few percentage points every year, unless something keeps those numbers in check, such as drought or disease—or poaching. The carcass evidence suggests that poachers in Botswana have concentrated on tuskers, the older bulls most likely to have the largest tusks.
Once those elephants are gone, poachers turn to the matriarchs. The matriarchs are the ones who know where to find water and food. Learn more about ivory poaching trends: Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks.
Chase points to two concessions in the Okavango Delta that have anti-poaching patrols—in those highly monitored areas, Elephants Without Borders found no elephants that had been killed for their ivory.
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The two main historical factors behind the decline of African elephants — demand for ivory and changes in land-use — still pose a serious threat to the species. Buy a gift of chili, dung and engine oil to help people and elephants in Africa!
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