I made a few wrong turns on the back roads in the open bush before the signs on the stone cairns started matching up with the directions I’d marked on my crumpled map. As a result, I was a bit late for my meeting with Karen van Rooyen in Skukuza, the main tourist camp and administrative hub of Kruger, South Africa’s flagship national park. She was talking on her cell phone as I drove through the open metal gate past security men into the bare sun-bright courtyard between a set of nondescript buildings tucked away among garages and warehouses. A sandy-haired young woman in crisp khakis, van Rooyen had recently been brought into the park’s conservation services to manage its wildlife products processing plant and to create some order in the ivory vaults.
Van Rooyen led me over to a low, red-roofed concrete building whose thick beige walls were pierced along one long side with a small pair of barred windows. We entered through a set of metal doors into a slab-floored storage room full of hides. I needed a moment for my eyes to adjust from the glare outside before taking in the huge stacks of mud-colored, stiff, wrinkled buffalo and elephant hides; a few lion skins; and cardboard boxes of hippo and warthog tusks taped together in different-sized bunches. There was a heap of elephant ears, as crinkled as giant potato chips, a pile of elephant tails with their impressive sprouts of stiff hair, like long-handled whisk brooms, and what looked like a tired length of fire hose. “Elephant penis,” she said matter-of-factly. All the hides were collected from carcasses brought in by the field rangers, she told me, salted, and stored. Some came from animals that had died of natural causes, the rest from problem animals that had to be shot or, in the case of buffalo, from animals culled as part of research into the outbreak of the bovine tuberculosis that had been affecting them. The collection is constantly growing, and van Rooyen was helping to organize these largely leather goods for eventual sale to the hide industry or, for that matter, to local traditional healers. The park would seek CITES permission to sell the elephant products, with the funds earmarked for conservation projects.
Something else piles up from Kruger’s twelve thousand–strong elephant population; it’s kept in the adjoining space, behind a concrete wall with a single, massive, bolted red steel door with a huge padlock. Van Rooyen unlocked this last of a series of barriers to the vault within. “I’m sure you’ve seen this sort of thing before,” she said as the door swung open, groaning on its metal hinges. A tilted rectangle of sunlight swept across the floor-to-ceiling stacks of curved elephant tusks lining the walls. I had, certainly, but not on this scale; I was startled by the sight of so many tons of ivory in clusters and piles and heaps, from little spikes and flutes to tusks that looked as big as alpenhorns.
Van Rooyen told me that the stout log racks, built so that different-size tusks could be sorted on them, finally cracked and collapsed under the growing weight and had to be rebuilt. Raw ivory is very hard to stack. There’s no way tusks really fit well together, so that even if they are laid as neatly as possible they still resist organization. I fingered some of the thin edges of the open ends of the bigger tusks—the “bamboo” end, as Moore had referred to it—and trailed my hand down their rounded forms. I could see the lip lines, a faint discoloration marking the extent to which the tusks were buried in the head. Some of the tusks were weathered—dried and cracked from exposure—before they were recovered; others were pitiably small tapers—juvenile tusks.
Much of this was found ivory—removed from dead elephants. But it’s not necessary to kill elephants to get their ivory, as many people today seem to assume. You can simply wait for them to die of natural causes. In days past, a large portion of Kruger’s stockpile would have been a byproduct of culling operations, but those were stopped in 1994. Then, too, there’s always some ivory that’s been taken from problem elephants shot because they’d flattened locals or threatened tourists, as well as some seized from poachers, although Kruger, as one of the continent’s best-managed parks, has relatively little of that.
I was admiring some of the impressive sweeps of ivory from older tuskers on the shelves when I spotted two startlingly huge moon crescents of ivory on the lowest level of the back racks. I got down on my knees to try to fit my fingers around the fattest of these nine-foot-long ivories, but I could see it would take almost three hand spans to encircle it. “Those are Mandleve’s tusks,” van Rooyen said, admiring them alongside me. One of the park’s more famous denizens, this great bull left behind the heaviest ivory ever recorded in Kruger: the right tusk weighs 162 pounds, the left tusk 152 pounds. Mandleve (Tsonga for “ears”) had a substantial notch missing from one ear, although that hardly would have been his most notable feature. A local Skukuza resident, he was frequently escorted by four young bulls who helped him push over and plow up greenery. In his old age he liked to rest his heavy tusks on riverbanks or the fork of a tree; he died of natural causes in 1993 at the presumed age of fifty-six. Van Rooyen said they hadn’t gotten around to sending up his tusks to the Elephant Hall at Letaba camp, where I was headed the next day.
As she locked the door van Rooyen told me I’d actually seen only half of their ivory cache—there was another vault as well, tucked away nearby. It too was overflowing with ivory. Nobody had totaled the amount recently, but Kruger’s current cache had to be close to fifty tons. It wasn’t possible to put a precise value on these tusks without a legal market for them, but without doubt I had just been looking at several million dollars’ worth. Thieves tried to crack into it once but were foiled; extra security has since been added.
Kruger is not the only park with stockpiles of ivory recovered from elephants. In fact, one to five tons of ivory a year pile up in warehouses of the parks departments of a dozen African countries; Zimbabwe alone adds ten. There is little agreement about what should be done with this ivory fortune. But as long as there are elephants this mountain of tusks will continue to grow.
HAILED AS A great achievement by many, the ivory ban began to appear as a less than perfect solution to the problems it was intended to address not long after it took effect on January 18, 1990. True, poaching fell dramatically from the levels that had so alarmed conservationists. Richard Leakey, Kenya’s wildlife director, was able to say that the country had moved from losing three elephants a day—more than a thousand each year—in its national parks to “sporadic and infrequent” elephant losses, forty-six in all of 1990. Ivory was bringing poachers a little over $1 a pound instead of the $32 a pound it had earned at its peak. Abandoned ivory caches found in Kenya and Tanzania led some to think that the old networks of corrupt ministers, diplomats, customs officials, and game wardens paid off by Hong Kong ivory kingpins had collapsed.
But poaching didn’t disappear. It wasn’t just that word hadn’t filtered down to the man behind the gun. There were still unregulated markets, some operating openly in Africa. For Leakey, that meant it was not enough to make buying ivory “social anathema” in Europe and North America. His solution was brutally simple: “The only way to permanently stop poaching is to destroy the ivory market.” Drying up all the value inherent in ivory by making it impossible to sell might be one way to make it pointless to poach. Whether that made sense, or could actually be achieved, was another matter.
Some researchers, including several participants in the Ivory Trade Review Group, the international panel of experts whose recommendation that the elephant be given an Appendix I listing under CITES helped bring about the ivory ban, were now having second thoughts. In 1990 economist Edward Barbier and three other authors, all former members of the group, argued that “the ivory trade ban must be considered an interim measure, not a solution.” While conceding that previous attempts at monitoring and regulating the ivory trade had failed, and that it “has been doing the elephant great harm in the vast majority of the African range states,” they pointed out that “in a small minority of states, the trade has been rendering the elephant important benefits. Thus, the crucial causal factor in the elephant’s decline has not been the ivory trade per se, but rather the failure of some states to utilize it constructively.”
This wasn’t a point of view that enjoyed much support in Europe and North America, where most of the public was breathing a collective sigh of relief at the imposition of the ivory ban. Still, some dissident opinions surfaced over concerns that the ban could have the opposite effect from the one intended. “Without ways to make money from their elephants,” an article in The Economist worried in 1991, “many African countries will see little reason to preserve them. For Kenya, the huge takings from tourism may be incentive enough. In other countries, the elephant’s main chance of survival will lie, counter-intuitively, in the value of its tusks.” The magazine suggested looking into a “toughly controlled trading system to market a limited quantity of sustainably harvested ivory.”
In the 1990s researchers analyzed the mechanisms of the ban as well, even working out economic models for poaching to study how its incentives were shaped by ivory prices and law enforcement deterrence. One such study used mathematical models, which took into account probabilities of output of tusks, detection and conviction, variable costs (salaries to gang members, costs of fines and bail), fixed costs (equipment such as modern arms and training), and a host of other factors, including the probable supply of ivory from legal and illegal sources reaching overseas consumer markets. It concluded that withholding legal production of ivory from overseas markets would only drive up illegal prices and encourage poaching, “highlighting the need for CITES to consider more carefully the interactions between trade bans and illegal trade in endangered species in cases where enforcement of bans is imperfect.” But these academic studies, thought-provoking as they were, received little media attention.
By 1994 nine African states were holding at least one hundred tons of stockpiled ivory, an amount that probably totaled two-thirds of the world ivory trade in 1988. Before the ban, the ivory trade had been worth something like $50 million a year to the African continent, perhaps double that if you added up all those involved in it, including indigenous carvers who made all the curios sold to tourists as well as more creditable sculpture. There was no effort to compensate states for lost revenues that could have gone to defray costly antipoaching efforts and game management or to support rural communities affected adversely by wildlife.
The unspoken issue lurking just under the surface of any discussion of the ban’s effectiveness was that Africans and their interests were still being ignored. In the 1930s the colonial view was that the “natives” couldn’t be trusted not to wipe out the game. By the 1990s African countries were in charge of their own destinies, but they were still being instructed by Europe and North America on how they should manage wildlife, especially their elephants. A lot of conservation on the continent had become a not so subtle form of intellectual colonialism. The enterprise of intervening “on behalf of nature” was couched in the language of assistance, help, advice, and support but mostly for narrowly conceived wildlife interests. In contrast with the overexploited environments that the European and North American public associates with its own countries (or at least parts of them), the “animal Eden” that Africa conjures up inspires the desire to ensure that Africans don’t follow the rape-of-the-land environmental despoliation policies that are now cause for regret in the first world.
It is difficult to imagine, though, how struggling African nations are supposed to keep vast swaths of their landmass pristine while simultaneously meeting their development goals. Africans can hardly be blamed if they bitterly conclude that the only way they can satisfy the developed world’s more extreme conservation interests is to remain in a permanent state of picturesque underdevelopment. No one in Washington or London would ever state the issue so starkly, but Africans, especially rural Africans, were still being urged to make choices that put animals before people, or at least put them on an equal footing, which is almost equally offensive. This arrogant approach was evident in the imposition of the ivory ban, in which the “global concerns” of individuals and groups from first world countries trumped sub-Saharan perceptions. Somehow the idea that national sovereignty gives Africans the right to be in charge of their own wildlife (something European and North American countries take for granted as the basis of their own wildlife policies) got lost in all the grand talk of saving the continent’s wildlife heritage (especially elephants) for future generations. In formulating the ban without in-depth consultation with African governments or local wildlife organizations, Africans, as one observer put it, were “once again relegated to reactive positions, labeled as progressive if agreeing with outside perceptions or cast as despoilers when presenting their own views.”
In 1991 Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa applied for CITES permission to downlist their elephants to Appendix II, which would have allowed them to reopen trade in ivory. A reported upsurge in smuggling in anticipation of the possible resumption of trade in ivory underscored the contention by advocates of the ban that a legal ivory trade would simply provide a cover for illegal trade based on poaching. At the March 1992 CITES meeting in Kyoto, the debate on this application featured much sermonizing and self-righteous proclamations, including a passionate statement on “the moral imperative for banning the ivory trade,” from, of all countries, Burundi, which had previously operated as an ivory smuggler’s El Dorado.
CITES was fast becoming a public relations forum, an opportunity for governments to be seen as doing something positive for the environment. Under press scrutiny, member states were especially mindful of their constituents. Rich countries—and their powerful lobbyists—held the most sway at these meetings. “It is the Western European and North American publics that stump up the money for wildlife lobbyists, and it is therefore, naturally, the rich man’s philosophy of wildlife management that prevails,” wrote David Harland. Because debates were pitched to appeal to the lobbyists’ constituencies, complicated solutions were quickly dropped in favor of simpler ones—“ones that will have appeal at the bumper-sticker level,” as Harland put it. “It is very much easier to say ‘Save the Elephant: Ban the Ivory Trade’ than it is to say ‘Save the Elephant: Support a Programme to Make Elephant Habitat Viable Against Human Encroachment.’”
Zimbabwe, feeling that the fate of its elephants was being determined by Europeans and North Americans with scant regard for how southern Africans might view things, submitted a proposal to put the North Sea herring on Appendix I as an endangered species, which would have necessitated halting all trade in the tasty little fish (having made their point, they later withdrew it). But in the face of the objections of many African countries—including those struggling with poaching—who had joined the opposition to any downlisting of the elephant, the southern African countries were forced to drop their downlist proposal. At the 1994 CITES meeting, South Africa and Sudan proposed downlisting their populations. Sudan had insufficient justification, and South Africa abandoned its proposal when it was clear there was no support.
In 1997, at a CITES meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, the first crack appeared in the ban: Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe were successful in getting approval to downlist their elephant populations, with trade in ivory limited to a tightly controlled, onetime sale from government stockpiles to Japan. The three countries earned a total of some $5 million.
ON A STEAMY hot July day in 1999, a freighter docked in Tokyo Bay with a shipment of some fifty tons of ivory, consisting of 5,446 elephant tusks from Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. This otherwise uneventful landing of goods marked the first time in a decade that there had been any legal international commerce in ivory.
Japanese ivory traders had been anxiously awaiting the shipment, whose arrival held out the hope that their country’s long ivory-carving tradition—and their businesses—might have a future. Sales of ivory had dropped 60 percent after the ban, despite the stockpiles on hand.
Japan’s ivory trade, like that of every other country, had operated without any specific regulations for all its prior history. Although the country became a signatory to CITES in 1973, it took seven years before it ratified the convention, out of concern to protect industries that utilized wildlife products. Even afterward, its adherence was less than enthusiastic. As in other ivory-carving cultures, traders had been conditioned to see cherished carving material when they looked at creamy tusks. They had known for centuries, of course, that ivory came from elephants, but looking at it for hints of its origin, or at the long, strange zigzag trek it might have taken to reach dealers’ storerooms, was a new and alien way for them to size up the raw material. Almost overnight ivory had taken on a new set of meanings and the tusks themselves became forensic evidence.
At first, some Japanese traders thought these new ideas and pressure for change were fashionable concerns that would fade away or bureaucratic impediments that could be safely ignored. In 1983 and 1984 one trader was still importing ivory from Burma, despite the fact that the endangered Asian elephant was listed in Appendix I, which meant all commercial trade in Asian ivory was prohibited. Japan was also importing huge quantities of ivory from Burundi, although the CITES secretariat in Switzerland had specially requested that member states not do so, given that all the ivory the elephant-empty country was exporting as its own was ipso facto poached. Under pressure, the country’s major ivory trade groups—both the Tokyo and the Osaka ivory arts and crafts associations—had promised in mid-1984 to police their members better, but the two groups couldn’t agree on import guidelines.
Mounting criticism of Japan’s ivory trade practices inspired the formation of a new group, the Zôgei Bukai (Ivory Importers’ Group), which brought together twenty-five ivory-importing companies, plus trade associations. Collectively, the members accounted for 98 percent of all Japanese ivory imports. They began implementing, initially on a voluntary basis, more stringent guidelines on ivory imports. Imports fell from the all-time high of 475 tons in the mid-1980s to 106 tons in 1988. Japan’s ivory industry may have been late in taking seriously the worldwide concern over the decline of Africa’s elephant herds, but it was now in full compliance with CITES and, at the same time, anxious to keep its ivory business alive. In the two weeks before the country’s June 19, 1989, ban on ivory imports from non-African states, a flurry of shipments totaling twenty-nine tons arrived from reexporting entrepôts like Hong Kong. Following the lead of other industrialized nations, it halted the importation of all ivory several months later.
Hoping for an accommodation that would allow a limited international flow of ivory, Japan pushed for a split listing at the CITES meeting that October, which would put the African elephant population on the Appendix I listing—except for those in the southern tier. Japan’s position was openly regarded with suspicion by some other delegations (and at home by its own small but vocal animal protection lobby), who wondered if its desire to gain support for a “sustainable use” elephant policy was part of an effort to build a case for its widely unpopular whaling policy. Caught between wanting to “avoid Japan’s isolation in the international community,” as one Japanese official put it, and wanting to yet remain sensitive to its domestic ivory industry, Japan abstained on the final vote to put the African elephant on Appendix I.
Japan’s support for the southern African position did not go unnoticed. Japan is the largest consumer of wildlife products in the world; its participation in CITES is vital to that convention’s success. What adds significance to the country’s unique position is that although Japan is a major industrialized power—the second largest economy in the world—its support for the “sustainable use” point of view rather than the openly preservationist stance taken by most first world countries made it a natural ally of many of the African elephant’s range states. As Kumi Furuyashiki details,
When Namibian President Sam Nujoma visited Tokyo in October 1996 and appealed to then Prime Minister of Japan Ryutaro Hashimoto to support Namibia’s proposal of downlisting the African elephant submitted to CITES together with Botswana and Zimbabwe for consideration at COP10 in the following year, and to allow export of ivory to Japan, Hashimoto announced Japan’s support, on the ground that “Namibia’s proposal is consistent with the principle” of “harmony between conservation and use” in dealing with wildlife.
Out of consideration for the “feelings of opposing countries” Japan declined to copropose the downlisting. Still, when Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe proposed downlisting their elephants at the Tenth Conference of the Parties to CITES in 1997, it was hardly surprising that Japan was selected as the sole importer of their ivory. Not only was Japan a traditional ivory market; it could consume all the ivory products it produced within its own borders. Besides, high labor costs made it uneconomical to export worked ivory, even if it were allowed. In addition, Japan was able to put a number of regulations in place to ensure that the ivory industry would be tightly controlled. The country’s traders, well aware that such changes, however burdensome, would be necessary, gave the system their full commitment. In mid-1995 the domestic ivory trade control system was begun. It required registration of every ivory trader, all tusks, cut pieces, even waste. In March of 1999 even more control procedures were introduced for production of hanko (name seals), the primary use for ivory in Japan. These required retailers to keep a record of hanko sales, purchasers, the size of hanko, remaining stocks, and the like. In practice, this meant that 80 percent of retail sales of ivory would be recorded and checked by the government.
Given the level of scrutiny Japan was willing to allow over its ivory industry, and the fact that reexporting ivory was prohibited, there was little more that could be asked. Some in the anti–ivory trade camp argued that not all the conditions for the shipment were properly fulfilled, and that this partial lifting of the ivory ban had led to an upsurge in poaching, but these objections failed to scuttle the sale.
BEFORE THE IVORY ban, upwards of thirty thousand Japanese made their living from ivory, including traders, traditional carvers, and shopkeepers selling hanko. In the Tokyo and Osaka ivory trades, names such as Kitagawa and Takaichi dominated, bringing in half the country’s imports between them. From traders, the ivory spread out through a series of factories, workshops, and individual craftspeople. Japan’s ivory industry was big business, exceeding, as Esmond Martin pointed out, the gross national product of some African countries. Those directly involved in the ivory industry earned more than $40 million annually; the retail value of finished ivory products was something like $250 million annually.
And what were the uses, other than hanko, to which all this ivory was being put? Small amounts went into the making of ivory components (and plectra) for traditional Japanese musical instruments such as the samisen, the koto, and the biwa. Ivory chopsticks, once a fashionable wedding present, but now less popular, were still produced at rate of four thousand pairs a month in the early 1980s. The craze for polished tusks, which took hold in the early 1970s when ivory looked as good as gold as a hedge against inflation, absorbed large quantities of ivory (one Toyota executive amassed a collection of a hundred such tusks, which he kept under the floors of his house in Nagoya). That fad soon faded when Japan experienced a recession. Ivory jewelry, lids for tea containers, even ear picks were still produced in quantity in the pre-ban days, and although much diminished, artistic traditions of ivory carving that dated back to the golden age of the netsuke masters persisted.
One noted figure was the Tokyo-based netsuke carver Masatoshi (Nakamura Tokisada). Esteemed for his birds, fish, mermaids, even blades of grass created from ivory, he had trained as an apprentice for seven years with his father, Ittensai Kuya. Kuya himself carved bijin (beautiful women) in ivory as well as netsuke and once crafted a cane with an ivory dragon handle for William Sebald, the American ambassador to Japan after World War II. Previous generations of the family had specialized in ivory okimono—finely carved ornaments. In the postwar period ivory was difficult to come by. Masatoshi searched shops and dealers for scraps and tusk remnants and sometimes used billiard balls or samisen plectra for his netsuke. Elephant ivory—zôge—was his favorite material, especially Asian ivory (“pinkish in color, small, even, and fine grained, oily, lustrous, and live”). But even for a master who bought only the “desirable parts of a desirable tusk”—notably the marusaki, or tip—some of the best African tusks could equal the Asian in quality. The important thing was to find the material “responsive.” Then, he wrote, “my knives seemed to sing and move along of their own accord.”
This exquisitely attuned sensitivity to ivory’s material properties extended even to the polishing of the netsuke, a time-consuming process, each stage of which removed the marks of the previous abrasive. Any traces left by sandpaper and emery paper were expunged by several hours of rubbing with the soaked leaves of the muku tree. To reach difficult areas, such as recessed details, Masatoshi sharpened a willow-wood chopstick; no other wood would do, as its uniformity (even the annual rings are no harder than the material between) and its resiliency made it perfect for the job. Still, he confessed, “my use of a willow chopstick is a violation of my father’s strict practice. He cut his own branch from a willow tree and shaped it himself into the sharp pointed sliver he wanted for his polishing.” Various powders, including burned stag antler, came next, but if Masatoshi was pleased with his netsuke, he liked to finish polishing the smooth little ivory with his bare hands (“I feel as though I were caressing one of my children”).
While the wondrously refined work of a handful of master craftsmen like Masatoshi was still sought by connoisseurs, the preponderance of ivory carving in Japan had fallen into repetitive forms of domestic and tourist bric-a-brac churned out by small factories of workers using drills to speed up what was left of a craft that once used some two hundred traditional hand tools.
In the early 1980s the manufacture of hanko absorbed just over half of ivory imports. Over the next two decades the percentage would grow to three-quarters of the quantity of ivory brought into the country. What accounted for this growth? Name seals are a traditional item of prestige and authority in East Asia. Originally the use of these circular or square ink stamps was limited to the aristocratic classes, but in the Edo period the use of hanko to prove identity became more common. By the Meiji period (1867–1912) laws requiring people to use hanko to mark official documents made them ubiquitous. The act of stamping such papers with personal seals typically dipped in a red ink paste authorized them; hanko were essential for cashing checks, concluding business correspondence, contracting to buy a car or home, or, for that matter, finalizing a marriage. Until the late 1990s, when the increasing use of credit cards requiring hand signatures for transactions became common, it was almost impossible to conduct business without the use of a hanko.
There are ten main types of hanko, three for individuals and seven for businesses. Martin estimated there might have been seventy million to one hundred million such seals in circulation in the early 1980s. The jitsuin, or personal seal, is used for legal transactions and is unique, registered with the government, and thus an important possession. In many ways, ivory is the ideal material for a hanko, as it can be finely carved, takes the ink well, and will last a lifetime. It’s also nice to touch and hold and its color has special appeal. Prior to the 1950s ivory was too expensive for most Japanese, who made do with wood, horn, or crystal. When ivory hanko first became popular, only the face of the seal with its characters was carved of ivory; the handle was typically boxwood or buffalo horn. By the 1960s most Japanese could afford a solid ivory hanko; twenty years later one would have cost about $90, which included the carving of several characters, a case, and a small ink pad.
The manufacture of hanko became largely mechanized, much like that of piano key veneers (which the Japanese produced in quantity for piano makers Yamaha and Kawai). In small, cramped factories, where a three-month supply of tusks would share space with what looked like woodworking benches covered with ivory dust, a dozen or so workers could turn out a surprising number. In 1980, Martin visited factories in Osaka that employed only nine workers but managed to produce sixteen hundred hanko a day. These seals, cylindrical in shape and about two inches long and half an inch wide, are easily machined and the process is, in fact, reminiscent of piano key production. After tusks are cut into drums of suitable length, a worker marks a cluster of circles of various diameters in red ink on the face of a particular slice: smaller circles for hanko using two characters, larger ones for hanko of up to four characters. Great care is taken to maximize the number of hanko that can be cut. Small round pegs corresponding to the drawn circles are then cut out of the ivory drum on an electric band saw. Each one is then clamped in a vise, rounded on a belt sander, and buffed with emery paper. Further steps involve cutting them to precise length, preparing the face for the cutting of the characters, and polishing them overall with boshu sand. At that point all those short sticks of ivory are much like one another, until a buyer purchases one at a shop and supplies a drawing of his or her personal “chop.” The shop then forwards this to a specialist, often a family-owned business in Rokugocho—famous as “hanko town”—in Yamanashi Prefecture. Carving characters on hanko is an exacting art. The head of the seal is cleaned with fine sandpaper, painted with red ink, and positioned in a vise, at which point a master craftsperson paints the individual characters on the red face in black. A carver carefully outlines the characters with a tiny electric drill, then examines the result under a magnifying glass; any last touches required are done with hand tools.
But ivory hanko, like ivory piano keys, are no longer what they were. Two million ivory hanko were made in 1980; almost a million in 1988. Their popularity was falling. Two years after the “onetime” ivory shipment arrived in Tokyo, only a little over a hundred thousand hanko had been produced—some still made entirely by hand by a few stubborn traditional craftsmen. Ivory use was dropping in Japan.
JAPAN’S IVORY TRADE regulations were complex and burdensome, even for retailers, but as critics of the country’s ivory policies, such as the Japan Wildlife Conservation Society, made clear, they still had loopholes that could be exploited. The JWCS and others pointed to a 2000 incident in which a hanko manufacturer (and board member of the Tokyo Ivory Arts and Crafts Association) was arrested trying to collect half a ton of raw ivory smuggled in cut pieces from Singapore to Kobe. It was mixed in with a shipment of chopsticks. Critics weren’t placated by the fact that the enforcement system worked well enough to catch the miscreant, but based on its findings in 2006 the CITES secretariat was satisfied that all that could be expected in terms of control was in place and recommended that “Japan should be, once again, designated as a trading partner.”
Despite the arrival of the fifty-ton “experimental” CITES-approved ivory shipment from Africa in 1999, the hope that there might be future ones, and the existence of stocks that would keep many manufacturers going for quite some time, there was deep pessimism in the trade about the future of the ivory industry in Japan. It wasn’t just the uncertainties of whether ivory would continue to be available; it was the public attitude toward it. That ivory might appear to younger Japanese as old-fashioned could be successfully countered by some stylish new use or novel jewelry design, but its increasingly negative image as a material associated, fairly or not, with the despoliation of nature had deeply affected the trade, and substitutes such as hippo teeth or mammoth ivory, along with synthetics, found little acceptance. By 2002 the retail value of ivory items produced in Japan had declined 90 percent since the imposition of the ivory ban. Little wonder that in his survey from the same year Martin found far fewer people working in the ivory industry, from traders to artisans, and an absence of apprentices. Without a steady supply—and, what’s more, a change in the public attitude—Japan’s ivory industry looked as though it might become a relic of the past.
THERE WAS ANOTHER ivory-consuming country waiting in the wings, one that would be more than willing to take Japan’s place as the final destination for all the tusks that Africa could spare, and then some: China.
In some ways, the country was an unlikely candidate. Since the imposition of the ivory ban China has been implicated in the importation and sale of illegal stocks and accused of reviving elephant poaching to feed its newly awakened appetite for ivory. In monitoring raw ivory and ivory product seizures, CITES found that China was “the single most important influence on the increasing trend in illegal trade in ivory since 1995.” Some of this suspect ivory was hand-carried to the People’s Republic: Chinese contract workers sent to work on large-scale building projects in Africa where ivory regulations are poorly enforced regularly returned home with illicit ivory. In Sudan, where up to five thousand Chinese work in the construction, oil, and mining industries, the price of ivory ominously doubled, a tip-off that local authorities were turning a blind eye to the flourishing open ivory markets in Khartoum and Omduman and the poaching that was supplying them.
Following the imposition of the ivory ban China initially did nothing about its own domestic trade in ivory. Then, in the early 1990s, the government decided that all trade in ivory should cease. Since the trade was conducted largely by government-run enterprises, and imports were also under government control, one might have thought this sweeping measure would have spelled the end to the several-millennium-old industry. Curiously, a few privately run factories and workshops continued to manufacture ivory items and some retailers sold carvings openly—even though all of them were ostensibly illegal—showing that the government was putting few resources into enforcement.
In the early 2000s China reviewed its regulations. Encouraged by the one-off sale to Japan, and recognizing that traditional carving skills were being lost, the government decided to reopen its domestic ivory industry under strict controls, at the same time cracking down on illegal activities. As CITES reported, China clearly hoped to “eventually become a legal importer of ivory from legitimate African sources and stockpiles.” The country began imposing its own elaborate ivory laws, registering processors and retailers and their stockpiles, even tracking individual ivory pieces that sold for more than 500 yuan (about $65)—dragging violators to court, X-raying imports, and taking draconian measures with smugglers, who now faced penalties, long imprisonment, even the death sentence for certain offenses, all in an effort to demonstrate the effectiveness of its new ivory regime.
China pushed to qualify as an appropriate buyer of tusks. By one measure alone China would be ideal. Although the country can find eager buyers for its ivory product exports, it has no need to do so. China’s sheer size—one-fifth of the world’s population—guarantees that its own domestic market for ivory would be in no danger of reaching saturation in the foreseeable future. Its new wealth is impressive. In 2006 China had three hundred millionaires, its four hundred wealthiest citizens had fortunes of $60 million or more, and the country boasted seven billionaires. Ivory, a historic marker of prestige and a symbol of wealth, is now within reach of many Chinese. Besides, along with all the traditional Chinese uses for the material, there are some tempting new ones. The Guangzhou Daily reported in 2006 that for a mere 180,000 yuan ($22,500) one could purchase an ornately carved ivory-cased mobile phone. Two of the first six made had already been sold.
The steps that the People’s Republic took to regulate its ivory trade created something of a Chinese puzzle for the member states of CITES. Given China’s recent history, they seemed unlikely to rush to approve it as a suitable market, even though the secretariat did. On the other hand, they did not want to wait too long to respond to China’s new effort to regulate one of its most ancient trades. In its 2005 report to the secretariat, the CITES investigative team admits that it “was very aware that the long-term success of what has been established in China, and the enthusiasm and compliance that is being shown by the accredited traders, depends upon fresh stocks of legal ivory becoming available. If they do not, the system is likely to collapse and it is hard to imagine that illicit trade would not then gain ground.”
In July, 2008, the Standing Committee of CITES agreed to designate China as an approved ivory buyer, along with Japan.
“WITH OUR LIMITED resources, we typically target more commercial operations,” Edward Grace said, swiveling in his chair and reaching with a long arm to pull down an annual report. “We go after smugglers, someone who’s trying to bring it in as something else, the galleries who know it’s illegal and are selling it to someone who also knows this.” The “it” was ivory, and Grace, senior special agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Division of Law Enforcement, is part of a cadre of agents who keep track of anything suspicious about ivory’s comings and goings in the country.
His small office overlooking Fairfax Drive in a high-rise building in Arlington, Virginia, a subway stop from Washington, D.C., had the expected crowded desk, computer, files, and bookshelves. But there was a neatness to the paper piles that suggested someone who’s often on the road. He’d helped crack smuggling operations that had brought in tons of endangered sturgeon roe and overseen investigations that led to the conviction of a New York retailer selling chimpanzee skulls, gorilla paw ashtrays, and other grisly items from endangered primates. But ivory remains a primary concern of his, and his casework on it has taken him as far as Kenya.
I had been asking him about what sorts of efforts his department was making to keep ivory from entering the country in the post-ban era. Grace gave me a basic overview of current U.S. regulations: no ivory, raw or worked, can be brought into the country, or reexported, unless it’s a bona fide antique. “If it’s over a hundred years old,” he pointed out, “that’s different.”
There’s actually a substantial U.S. trade in older ivories. Between 1997 and 2001, for example, worked ivory worth an average of $164.8 million a year was imported, over thirty thousand items, typically carvings, although ivory pieces, jewelry, and piano keys were brought in as well. Some ivory art, valued at $1 million or more, was destined for museums or private collections. The majority came from Britain; other exporters included France, Canada, and Japan. Ivory art is a specialized area of the international art market—just a few galleries, auction houses, antiques dealers, and Internet sites do most of the business, and there are reexports of these art ivories as well.
There are no more legal imports of raw (unprocessed) ivory into the United States, with one exception, Grace explained: tusks considered a personal “sport-hunted trophy” from an approved list of African range states (those with well-managed herds). However, these tusks, of which around three hundred per year are brought in, can’t be sold; essentially, they must remain in noncommercial limbo. No raw ivory, including sport-hunted trophies, may be reexported. There are further refinements. Intrastate sale of ivory is allowed if the ivory is legally imported or acquired, but twenty-three states have laws that can complicate such transactions—for example, California does not allow ivory to be brought into the state for commercial purposes. Interstate sale of ivory is also generally permitted, although for complicated reasons Asian ivory is subject to tighter restrictions on interstate (and intrastate) sales. The federal government doesn’t attempt to monitor every domestic ivory purchase, although Grace’s department will aggressively investigate individuals it suspects of dealing in illegal ivory. In short, domestic trade in ivory isn’t closely monitored, as evidence, in 2004, that illicit ivory was being purchased from China over the Internet as “antiques” by credulous buyers clearly showed. Even though they should, “people don’t ask questions,” said Grace, shaking his head.
What is being policed with some effectiveness are the borders. The size and wealth of the American market make it a major destination for illicit ivory. In the period 1989 through 2001, the United States reported five times as many seizures of illegal ivory as did any other country. Much of the confiscated ivory is brought in by tourists who are not aware (though many surely are) of the law, and there is serious smuggling as well. Grace led the efforts to break up a smuggling ring that resulted in two of the largest ivory seizures in recent years, with a value of some $350,000. On September 17, 2000, fifty-three-year-old Oumar Keita, of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, arrived at JFK in New York on a KLM flight with a substantial amount of luggage, including fifty-seven ivory carvings that had been crudely covered with a mixture of sand and paper pulp to mimic stone sculptures. This stratagem had been used nine months before, but unsuccessfully, by another Ivory Coast denizen, Bayo Namory, who was caught and sent to prison. Agents found prison letters from Namory in Keita’s luggage, along with business cards of African art dealers in New York. The second smuggling attempt didn’t work either. Keita, too, was convicted and sent to prison.
Hiding costly material under a cheaper covering that could later be removed is an age-old smugglers’ trick, and hardly confined to ivory. Ivory forgery itself, a distinct subspecialty of art forgers, has been around since ancient times. In the post-ban era, however, there are new variants in the venerable game of trying to pass off something newly created as something old and valuable. There is money to be made if a new carving can pass muster as an official “antique,” no matter how crude. If such a ruse can get the new material safely into a country’s internal market, it can always be recarved.
AS I WAS leaving his office, Ed Grace gave me a stack of documents on U.S. wildlife laws that deal with ivory—the major ones include the Lacey Act, the Endangered Species Act, CITES, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the African Elephant Conservation Act. Where these overlap, the stricter legislation prevails. Later, as I looked through them, I found complex provisions that deal with noncommercial use of pre–CITES ivory, the movement of personal and household effects, and the like, but no mechanism that directly regulates the internal, domestic trade in ivory. That is understandable: it would be exceedingly difficult to monitor.
By the time of the buildup to the ivory ban in the late 1980s, the United States accounted for only about 10 percent of world imports of ivory—and a lot of that consisted of trinkets from Hong Kong. But tons and tons of ivory were already in the country. The United States, like many first world nations, has huge amounts left from all the commerce that took place in the centuries before international trade in elephants’ teeth was halted. The vast majority of such ivory is worked and has about as much documentation as one would normally have for furniture, table-ware, musical instruments, figurines, or any other collectibles or baubles—in other words, almost none. And while little American ivory carving is being done, except for turning chunks of pre-ban raw ivory into knife handles, gun grips, and inlays for pool cues, a substantial number of ivory figures, jewelry, piano keys, and the like are bought and sold domestically, legally and openly. You can purchase museum-quality netsuke, lovely ivory jewelry like Elsa Peretti’s Bone bracelet designed for Tiffany in the mid-1970s, antique pianos with ivory keys, nineteenth-century scrimshaw, narwhal tusk walking sticks, tasteless tourist trinkets, and a thousand other ivory items from galleries, dealers, shops, flea markets, estate sales, auctions, the Internet, or private individuals.
There are the same open domestic markets in Britain and the rest of Europe, where the total amount of ivory in each country could easily exceed that of the United States, given their long histories of ivory importation. Martin and Stiles found that the vast majority of ivory on sale in Europe in 2004 consisted of antique pieces; only in Germany and France are there any carvers left, creating new work from old and legal stockpiles. Their survey showed 8,325 ivory items for sale in 776 retail outlets in London alone. While virtually all of it was pre-ban material, some wasn’t. Scotland Yard’s wildlife crime unit conducted raids on three central London antiques dealers suspected of involvement in selling illicit ivory that had come from Africa by way of Asia. From there it was smuggled into the UK, where either reputable dealers were duped into purchasing ivory they believed to be genuinely antique or corrupt ones were willing accomplices in the deception. England and the United States are hardly the only markets smugglers target. According to one analysis, between 1995 and 2002 “shipments of illegal ivory in various quantities were intercepted and seized from more than 80 countries spread across every continent except Antarctica.”
The impact of all this on elephants? It’s difficult to determine the numbers of elephants that might be poached to supply the illegal trade, but three researchers—Nigel Hunter, then of CITES’s MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants) program; Esmond Martin; and Tom Milliken of TRAFFIC, the joint WWF/IUCN wildlife trade monitoring network—studied the question in their 2004 paper. Using estimates of the numbers of carvers in various markets and the amount of ivory they use allowed these researchers to estimate ivory consumption in twenty-five countries around the world. They were surprised to find that “unregulated ivory markets in Africa appear to consume a higher volume of ivory than those in Asia”—an indication, it would seem, of how little control many African countries have of their own internal ivory trade.
Hunter, Martin, and Milliken concluded that some 4,800 to 12,250 elephants are killed each year to supply Africa and Asia—and beyond. “Significant quantities of carved ivory” from these two continents, they noted, “are being purchased for selling commercially elsewhere in the world.” Where are these elephants coming from? Evidence points to the Congo Basin in Central Africa, where successive conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have taken the lives of some five million people since 1998, creating one of Africa’s worst humanitarian crises, a gaping wound that is far from healing. The animal toll in the war-torn Congo is clearly the collateral damage of its immense human tragedy.
THE DIFFICULTY OF distinguishing between objects made from pre-ban and post-ban ivories creates one sort of enforcement problem. Another is the difficulty of trying to determine the source of illegal ivory seized—a method for doing this would, obviously, vastly aid in cracking down on poaching. In the early 1990s researchers looked into trace element analysis of tusks to see if there was some way to discover their origin. Ivory from grass-eating elephants is higher in carbon-13 than ivory of elephants that consume shrubs, but analyzing isotopes of carbon and other elements in teeth to look for a diet “signature” that could be associated with a given geographic area proved futile. With habitat change, elephants shift their sources of food and thus show striking differences in carbon isotope ratios from individual to individual, even in the same herd.
But DNA analysis may offer the best chance of finding a “finger-print” that would make it possible to examine raw (or worked) ivory and determine where it came from. Biologist Samuel Wasser at the University of Washington, Seattle, developed a technique in 2003 with two colleagues to drill out core samples from tusks for analysis, and found that they contained intact DNA—as good as that from skin or blood samples. Elephant populations have characteristic DNA profiles, so Wasser collected DNA gathered from four hundred elephants at twenty-eight sites across Africa. Fortunately, dung samples provided animal DNA as readily as tissue samples (elephants’ high-fiber diet ensures that lots of cells are sloughed off from their intestines), making the information a lot easier to collect. “Using DNA,” Wasser claimed, “it is possible to determine, with near 100 percent accuracy, whether an individual sample originated from a savanna or a forest elephant.” Other researchers think that’s an exaggeration, as hybridization between the two species can muddle the genetic picture. Still, Wasser hopes to create a reference map of African elephant habitats that could locate the origin of a tusk to within three hundred to six hundred miles.
The method was put to the test on tusks seized in Singapore in June 2002. The shipment, consisting of a twenty-foot container packed with six and a half tons of tusks in Malawi, had been shipped to Singapore via South Africa. After successfully extracting DNA from a sample of thirty-seven tusks, Wasser and his team went on to rule out forest elephants and conclude that the 532 tusks did not come from multiple locales, as originally suspected, but most likely originated from a narrow band of southern Africa, centered on Zambia—a claim that understandably rattled the wildlife service there.
Judging from the press reaction to Wasser’s findings, the promise of this method led many to overlook its shortcomings. It needed far, far more precision before it could become a powerful antipoaching enforcement tool. And it was cumbersome—nothing that would lend itself to an instrument that customs officers at ports of entry could casually use on a tusk, the way a store clerk might swipe a bar code on a cereal box to get a price. It involved destructive sampling: the use of a 16-mm drill bit to remove a chunk of dentin the size of a pencil eraser—hardly appropriate for art objects, but feasible for raw ivory shipments. In addition, it cost $100 or so a test. Still, that might be a small price to pay in the quest to pinpoint elephant poaching.
WITH ELEPHANT IVORY in short supply after the trade ban, other animal populations have been tapped to yield what they can in carvable dentin.
This is where the hippopotamus reenters the picture. Although there are distinct size limitations to its canines and incisors and the thick enamel is a chore to remove, it nevertheless provides a source of carvable ivory suitable for jewelry, small figurines, knife handles, etc.; by itself, the tusk has trophy value. The species was listed on CITES Appendix II in 1995, so the international trade in hippo products is still legal, albeit more closely monitored. Gross exports of hippo ivory, raw and worked, fell after the listing but substantial amounts are imported into a number of countries. From 1995 to 2002 more than one and a half tons of hippo ivory was brought into the United States, far more by weight than the elephant ivory cleared for importation in the same period. Most of it originates in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Uganda, but the vast majority of hippo ivory carvings that arrive in the United States have taken a detour to Hong Kong to be processed.
Prior to its listing on Appendix II, the total African hippo population was estimated at around 157,000 animals. International monitoring after the listing detected little to indicate that trade levels had a significant effect on populations, but in late 2006 came news that hippos in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern border were being routinely slaughtered. Out of what was once one of Africa’s largest hippo populations (estimated at more than 22,000 in the mid-1980s), there were thought to be only 315 animals left. Congolese rebel groups (of which there are at least three) in the highly insecure region are responsible for the depredation. In that desperate corner of the world, the slaughter may be driven more by the bushmeat trade than by the hope of selling some teeth.
The tusks and teeth of marine animals, such as sperm whales, narwhals, and walruses, constitute minor fractions of the remaining nonelephant trade in ivory and are listed as Appendix I, II, and III, respectively, as well as being subject to other legislation (such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the United States), which further restricts their trade. Commerce is completely unrestricted, however, when it comes to the teeth of the long-gone mammoth, whose often spectacular tusks are being dug up at a rate that alarms paleontologists. They would much prefer that these be carefully unearthed in the course of scientific research rather than grubbed up and sold as a guilt-free alternative to elephant ivory. It’s not just that all the information about the location where they were found is lost; as Ross MacPhee told me, “It’s also the tusks themselves that contain a great deal of information on the individual animal.”
The urge to uncover this buried treasure is understandable. A year and a half after the ivory ban went into effect, mammoth ivory was going for $300 a pound, triple what elephant ivory fetched just before trade in it came to a halt. No wonder the Russians are mining their mammoth remains. By some estimates, ten million mammoths are buried in the Siberian permafrost, and it’s anyone’s guess how many there might be in Alaska and Canada. With increased Arctic thawing brought on by global warming, it’s becoming easier to find these great looping teeth. A Yakut can make $25 to $50 a pound by turning in the tusks he finds to the regional depository, perhaps more if the official channels are bypassed. A single small, striking blue-streaked mammoth tusk from Siberia’s Tamyr peninsula went for £6,000 at a Sotheby’s sale in 2006.
As an alternative to elephant ivory as carving material, however, mammoth ivory has received mixed reviews. German carvers in Erbach have cautiously adapted to it, deciding to play up the unusual coloration given to it by long burial in the earth, but it’s widely disdained in Japan. There, carvers complain that mammoth ivory cracks, that the colors are unattractive, and that it smells “dirty” when it’s worked. On the other hand it’s become widely used in China (from 1994 to 2001 Hong Kong imported seventy-seven tons of it for reexport to the People’s Republic). Mammoth ivory jewelry is even something of a fad in the United States, where its impressive age and odd coloration make it the perfect attention-getting material for provocative nasal, navel, and nipple piercings.
Other than pig tusks, there are no other ivories that could supply the market, although in 2002 bioengineered teeth were successfully grown in rat hosts, holding out the possibility that artificial ivory might be able to be grown in vitro. Somehow, the prospect of mass-producing dentin that way, even if it could be turned out in any size and quantity, like a kitchen-countertop composite, does not sound as if it would satisfy the age-old desire for ivory.
IT IS NOT complimentary to our vaunted civilization and technical knowledge,” E. D. Moore reflected, “that our chemists and inventors cannot—though often they have tried—give us some material that in beauty and in touch will prove a satisfactory alternate for the jewels of the noble elephant.” He concluded, with deep misgivings for the future of the elephant, that there was no such substitute. He was right, of course, but why is this?
In the nineteenth century there were many uses of ivory in which it functioned as the plastic of its age. Eventually, plastic proved to be a more than adequate substitute for some uses, and could even be superior: billiard balls are a perfect example. But whenever ivory is used because it is ivory, then there is no possible stand-in. Some ivory-ban advocates seem strangely confused about its appeal. “Ivory, after all, has little intrinsic worth. Much of its allure comes from the subliminal power of the elephant, which turns even the gaudiest bauble worn around the neck into an amulet, and a carved figure into a household god,” wrote one journalist. “But without the elephant’s magic, the market withers.”
That view is flatly contradicted by history. Ivory was in demand for its luminous loveliness and ability to embody artistic vision even in cultures (like that of the Greeks) unsure of the creature it came from. India revered both the substance and the animal that provided it; China, Japan, Europe, and North America simply revered the substance. Even when the elephant was known, and a potent symbol to boot, the desire for ivory wasn’t driven by interest in the elephant. Ivory itself, save in some African contexts, is rarely regarded as a talisman of the elephant. Undeniably, however, part of ivory’s appeal is that it is a natural material. What draws people to ivory, as opposed to celluloid, alabrite, and the various resin compounds concocted to imitate it, is similar to what draws them to fine wood rather than to plastic. The material is individual, the genuine article, wrested from nature.
Pianists, understandably, were often conflicted about the ivory ban. Quite apart from ivory’s aesthetic appeal on the keyboard, the reason to have it there was for its touch. Most pianists were convinced that it enhanced their ability to play the instrument. Mid-twentieth-century performers from Arthur Rubinstein to Liberace remained skittish about plastic—sweaty fingers could hydroplane on such keys. In the 1980s Gary Graffman was said to have “a deep fear of ivory deprivation.” To provide for these purists, firms like Bösendorfer in Austria sold 150 pianos with ivory keyboards a year in the United States in the decade before the ban. Steinway quietly sold such pianos as well, but it was becoming politically incorrect to do so. The firm stopped using ivory in 1982.
Synthetic polymers had been in widespread use on keyboards since the 1950s but found few fans among serious pianists. In the 1980s Yamaha developed Ivorite, made from casein (milk protein) and an inorganic hardening compound, which was trumpeted as having both the moisture-absorbing quality of ivory and greater durability. Unfortunately some of the first keyboards cracked and yellowed, requiring refitting with a reformulated veneer. Clearly there was room for improvement. Steinway helped fund a $232,000 study at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in the late 1980s to develop a superior synthetic for keyboard covers. In 1993 the project’s team created (and patented) an unusual polymer—RPIvory—that more closely duplicated the microscopically random peaks and valleys on the surface of ivory that allow pianists’ fingers to stick or slip at will. Some pianists weren’t able to notice any difference between playing on the new substance and playing on ivory. “But,” Mischa Dichter admitted after choosing a Steinway grand with the new keys, “I’m relatively insensitive in that respect.”
In the post-ban era, a pianist attempting a border crossing with a favorite ivory-keyed instrument could be in for a discordant shock. The Israeli-American concert pianist Ophra Yerushalmi found that out in January 1993. Like Liszt, who also played one, she fell for the tone of an érard piano, a 1920 rosewood grand she came across in Paris the year before. Yerushalmi purchased the instrument and shipped it air freight to New York with its CITES form describing its ivory keys. But because it wasn’t a century old it was refused customs clearance at JFK Airport. The law was clear; the Fish and Wildlife Service was firm: the piano had to be returned to France or have its ivory keys stripped. Distraught, yet unable to part with it, Yerushalmi brought her own piano restorers to perform the required maiming at the Air France warehouse. In advance of dismantling the piano and softening the ivory veneers with a steam iron, she insisted on giving a short Chopin recital to a dozen warehousemen, who paused to listen before the chisels were brought out.
I CAME ACROSS elephants soon after leaving the ivory vault at Kruger. Scores of them were crossing the shallow Sabie River that paralleled the route I was taking to Oliphants camp, some six hours north in the park. I pulled to the side of the road and watched through binoculars from my idling rental car as they emerged on the opposite bank, their dark wet legs and bellies giving them a two-toned appearance as they strode into the bush. I rolled back onto the blacktop. Aware that the speed limit in the park is a modest 30 miles per hour, I was conscious of the long trip ahead of me. It’s difficult not to creep above that rate of progress on what look like unobstructed straightaways through open scrubland, but after having a couple of giraffes materialize seemingly out of nowhere to stand in the road I was more careful to check the speedometer.
My destination the next day was the Elephant Hall at Letaba, an hour or so farther on from Oliphants, which gave me an excuse to indulge in travel snobbery, the kind that those familiar with a landscape affect in the presence of gawking tourists. The scattered cars, vans, and occasional buses that shared the park’s road system with me invariably stopped whenever they spotted a vehicle pulled over, taking it as a signal that there was some animal life within camera range, although sometimes it was just someone hoping to get a signal on a cell phone. Having been in several very off-the-beaten-track regions in Africa, I was sure I wouldn’t see anything I hadn’t already seen before and just kept driving. But soon enough I found it irresistible to stop to admire and sketch an impressive list of critters: impala, zebra, wildebeest, waterbuck, baboons, hippos, warthogs, monitor lizards, a tortoise. I watched black-feathered, hulking southern ground hornbills march around my car when I stopped to photograph a pair of mid-sized elephants in a marshy spot under a bridge, enjoying their midday salad bowl. Of course, I was experiencing only a very thin slice of Kruger’s biodiversity, which extends over seventeen ecological zones that are home to 146 animal species and some five hundred of birds.
Although a lot of Kruger is a vast reservoir of bush, a fair portion of it is accessible to the public. You can’t get out of your car and wander around on your own, obviously, but you can go on guided walks and game drives and stay in a wide range of accommodations. You can rough it in bush camps and fire up your own braai, or watch wildlife at a waterhole from the vantage point of your hot tub in an ultra-luxe lodge. Oliphants, a main rest camp perched on a hill several hundred feet above the river of the same name, was comfortably between, with a restaurant, petrol station, electricity in the huts, and, best of all, marvelous views of the slow, twisting river below in which hippos wallowed and burped as raptors wheeled in the sky above. It was Africa, all right, and I got to thinking it was probably wild enough for most of the million-plus visitors that come to the park each year. They’re warned about snakes, bats, scorpions, spiders, and thieving baboons, but the deadliest creature they are likely to encounter is the malaria-carrying anopheles mosquito. That’s a fair trade-off, considering the array of game that can be seen from the safety of a vehicle.
Early the next morning I was half a mile from the turnoff to Letaba when I glanced over at the acacia trees lining the road and thought I saw an elephant. I stopped and backed up slowly and, yes, there was big bull right behind a screen of trees, ripping off branches to chew. Several cars whizzed by as I came up alongside him. Other cars slowed and paused for a couple of snapshots but quickly tired of watching him shove sticks in his mouth. He moved closer to the road where there was less of a screen of trees. The bull was now in profile, and I took an entire roll of photographs.
Some animals are easy bystanders to all that goes on around them, fitting more or less seamlessly (or sneakily) into human settlements, such as pigeons in a town square or squirrels in a city park, rats in alleys, deer in suburban backyards. But elephants, unless persecuted, are used to doing whatever they want to do. This one was immensely indifferent to me. In the shell of a car I was familiar enough. Homo vehicularis is no threat to a park elephant but is sometimes an annoyance that requires scaring off. He munched on sloppily, dropping half-masticated branches from the front end while the back end dropped a volley of melon-sized turds that split and steamed as they plopped on the ground. Having moved his bowels satisfactorily, he shifted his hindquarters, swelling his penis into a piebald yardarm that descended until it almost reached the ground. He ripped off more leafy branches, constricted his trunk to turn them into a bouquet, and wedged them in his jaws. His penis slowly retracted as he angled closer to the road.
I clicked off another half dozen photos, thrilled at how his steady, shambling gait was bringing him nearer, filling my viewfinder until there was nothing but his forehead. … I started the car and rolled forward submissively on the shoulder of the road, not wanting to test his temperament with a rental car. He passed behind me and I could see he was carrying big ivory, especially the right tusk—thick, curved, long. I snapped a three-quarter shot just as a little bakkie scooted by, its startled driver swerving at the sight. The tusker never broke stride but crossed the road to the acacias on the other side, then was swallowed up silently by the bush.
I remembered a story someone had told me years back about how visitors to Kruger in a new Mercedes didn’t move their car when a big bull strode toward them from behind, thinking he’d move around them. He did, but as he came around the front he decided to let them know what he thought of having his path blocked and promptly sat on the hood, crushing the front end of the car. The terrified occupants sprang from the vehicle like pips shooting from squished fruit. After a few minutes I drove slowly into Letaba.
In the thatched-roof exhibit space of the rest camp’s Elephant Hall was the array I’d come to see: “The Magnificent Seven”—the mounted ivories of Kruger’s biggest tuskers. About thirty years ago, Kruger’s chief warden hatched the idea of gaining attention for the park’s conservation successes by identifying seven bulls carrying one hundred pounds or more of ivory per side and borrowed the title of the 1960 Hollywood movie as their collective name. It was a public relations coup, and as each of the original group died its tusks were collected for exhibit. I wandered around marveling at each display, a few with full head mounts, a couple with skulls, but most with just photographs and stories of the old boys and of course their unreal ivories.
Some tusks were mirror images of each other, others more mismatched, but every one was impressively thick, long, and heavy—except for João, whose tusks, sadly, were broken off and never found. Most have local names: Mafuyane, Shingwedzi, Dzombo, Shawu, Ndlulamithi, Kambaku. All died of natural causes in their fifties and sixties, except for Dzombo, who was gunned down in 1985 by a Mozambique poacher who sneaked into the park but was surprised by rangers before he could make off with his ill-gotten booty. Since then, their ranks have been supplemented by the likes of Pelwana, Nhalangulene, and, of course, Mandleve, whose stupendous tusks I’d handled in the vault. It’s an educational and scientific exhibit, certainly, but also a shrine to some of the most glorious tusks in nature.
Not many visitors lingered long in the hall. Understandably, most wanted to get out on the network of roads and possibly photograph one of the park’s living legends, such as Duke, Sikele, Mashagadzi, and a dozen other up-and-coming fellows already carrying suitable names along with their big teeth. Should they live out their days in peace, they too might someday join their brothers in this elephant Valhalla.
The park’s less impressive elephants, though, may face a different future.
“COULD BE AN eighty-pounder,” Ian Whyte said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and studied the photo I’d taken of the bull I came across at Letaba the year before. “I’d say about forty-five years old. Give him another ten years and he’ll need a name.” He pushed it back to me across his desk.
Ian Whyte, who joined the park’s staff in 1970, is Kruger’s elephant man. The genial, beefy senior scientist and research manager of large herbivores had been flying transects for an animal census when I visited the ivory vault in 2005. I returned to talk with him to better understand the “southern African point of view” that had emerged in the ivory trade debates. I knew that when it began as the Sabie Game Reserve in 1898 Kruger had no elephants (all of them having been shot out by early settlers), but that the species had quickly reestablished itself. And I knew that Whyte’s latest census had put its elephant population at 12,467, about four thousand more than the park is thought to be able to support without damage to its environment. But were there no alternatives to culling elephants? If those who say that soon enough most of Africa’s elephants will end up in national parks are right, then I wanted to know what was likely to be in store for them in a well-run one.
We met in his paper-stuffed office in one of the modest staff buildings in Skukuza. When it was announced in 2005 that Kruger might be considering reviving the culling programs of the past, Whyte found himself in the spotlight, not a position he particularly enjoys. The South African press scrutiny was intense and the country’s parks system had to reassure an entire range of conservation and wildlife groups, both domestic and international, that it would study the highly charged issue long and hard before taking any steps. Whyte apologized for fielding an inquiry on the culling issue from the Washington Post during our talk. “I’m becoming a full-time PR manager,” he sighed. While he was on the phone I looked at a letter pinned on the bulletin board. Sent by a class of German schoolchildren in Frankfurt, it was decorated with hearts but bluntly compared culling to “mass murder,” and asked why elephants have to be shot just because they eat trees and bushes and “affect the park a little.”
I asked if the recent vast increase in the park’s size could absorb the presumed excess of elephants. (In 2002 Kruger formally merged with Limpopo National Park in Mozambique and Gonarezhou in Zimbabwe. Kruger, itself a 7,700-square-mile chunk of land in the northeast corner of South Africa, and was now dropping the fences between it and the two neighboring parks, effectively doubling its area.) Whyte showed me the map of what’s now collectively called the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park, one of several similar projects aimed at locking up great swaths of land for wildlife across Africa.
“To me those are some of the most positive initiatives in conservation that have come up in a very long time,” Whyte said. But parks, he explained, no matter how big, are still islands in the middle of human settlement. “And these areas,” he said, moving a stubby finger around the map, “are going to become more isolated from the rest of human development around it.” Now that the fences were coming down, I imagined the elephants of Kruger spreading out into the less densely occupied parks next to it and, perhaps, delaying any population crisis.
When I shared this with him, Whyte shook his head and took me over to another wall, which was covered with maps decorated with scores of colored dots. Each color, he explained, represented a radio-collared elephant, some of which have been broadcasting their whereabouts since 1989.
“You can see that this elephant doesn’t go far. And its home range has been much the same for seventeen years.” The other colors of dot clusters didn’t look much larger, including one around Oliphants.
Don’t elephants migrate?
“There’s no scientific basis, or even anecdotal basis, that supports that. It’s all in people’s heads. ‘Open up the fences,’ people say, ‘and allow the traditional migration of elephants …’ What traditional migration? We know absolutely nothing about ‘traditional migrations.’ It’s rot.”
I looked dubious.
“Elephants in Kruger live in these home ranges and, look, we do nothing to keep them there. They stay there by themselves; that’s where they want to be. They know where water is in the droughts, and where to find food in a drought. They are not going to go to an area that they don’t know. They stay where they’re happy, like people in an area who know where to buy milk and where the supermarket is.”
But what about elephant behavior in Namibia and Botswana?
“Certainly in the more arid regions,” Whyte conceded, “studies show that the home ranges tend to be much, much larger”—elephants have to wander a lot farther afield to get what they need.
“The point is if you open up the fence between Kruger and Mozambique, who’s going to go over there? It’s not these elephants,” he said, pointing to the recorded perambulations of the homebodies. “They don’t even know there’s a fence there. They’ve never been there.”
Whyte added that the park did move twenty-five elephants to Mozambique in a pilot project. “They all came back to Kruger!” he said, looking over his glasses at me. “Still, they are moving across, but as if they are exploring.” He flatly dismissed the idea that elephants in an area of abundant food and water would be drawn to a different area with harsher conditions where they would conveniently die, thereby cutting back their population.
“You know, elephants are not stupid,” he said, ignoring his lit-up phone. “We expect that they will move into Mozambique, but it will be a slow process, and where there’s only seasonal water elephants will not be able to establish themselves permanently.”
And the argument that Kruger has too many artificial water holes, which are distorting the environment in their own way, boosting animal populations? Kruger was full of riverbeds, Whyte told me, many of them dry seasonally, but water was not a limiting factor in Kruger. “Animals don’t die of thirst in Kruger,” he said, adding that the trend was now to close the water holes that previously had been bored around the park.
In another office, Whyte showed me the vegetation of the park from a different point of view: photographs of horizons of the same locales taken years apart. The older ones showed lush panoramas, with tall knob thorn and fever trees used by raptors and storks; the newer ones showed the same landscapes progressively thinned out and sometimes reduced to shrub. “Elephant damage in Kruger is not drastic, but it’s insidious,” he said. “Elephants start to push over trees, they eat the leaves, the bark, the roots—they just keep going.” Because they can make use of practically anything in the vegetable kingdom, by the time they start to die there’s hardly anything left.
Whyte took me back into his office to look at a few graphs on his computer. The elephant population in Kruger is growing at about 6 percent a year—doubling every ten to twelve years. He clicked on more graphs. In Kruger, some sixteen thousand elephants have been taken out of the park over its history, either culled or translocated—more than its current population. I wondered out loud what the current population would be had nothing ever been done, and in answer he clicked on a graph that showed that if no culling had been done from 1966 on, Kruger would now have perhaps eighty thousand elephants, the equivalent of Zimbabwe’s entire elephant population, squeezed into the park. There was another that showed that if no action was taken from now on, the park would have thirty-four thousand elephants by 2020, about what Kenya has now, quite enough to start a Tsavo-like situation in which the elephants would start eating themselves out of house and home.
Then what curbs could there be on population growth? I mentioned translocation.
“We’d have to move seven hundred fifty elephants a year just to stabilize the population. Unfortunately, we can’t even give them away.” And translocation is wildly expensive, as much as $8,000 per animal. You need a veterinarian and team, crews, trucks, hoists, helicopters, even air freight, depending on how far you have to take them. The park might find funding to airlift elephants to some area where they needed to be reestablished in a onetime operation, but finding the revenue necessary to translocate animals on a year in, year out basis, ad infinitum, was another matter.
Birth control?
“We’ve been accused by certain animal rights groups of ignoring contraception. On the contrary, we encouraged this research,” Whyte said. “In fact the basic research that’s done on it has been done at Kruger.”
Whyte made it clear that some form of contraception or sterilization can be done for small populations—say, twenty elephants in a pocket park. Beyond that the problems with this approach become all too evident. Take the bull, for example. You’d think performing a vasectomy might not be all that difficult on a male elephant but, no, his cantaloupe-sized testes are under a foot or more of skin, muscle, and fat, tucked up right against his kidneys, necessitating major abdominal surgery. Even ignoring the huge expense of an operation that involves darting the animal, using a crane truck to put him a sling, employing a full medical team, and undertaking a two-hour procedure, if it’s successful it won’t guarantee that females won’t get impregnated by an unsterilized bull. In short, Whyte said, “vasectomies just delay pregnancy”—they don’t prevent it.
With female elephants contraception is equally complicated. There are implants that will ensure a constant release of estrogen into the cow’s system, preventing estrus. But estrogen is metabolized by the cow and passed out in her urine. It’s detectable to bulls, who read as a signal that she’s in estrus. The bull chases her but she won’t be receptive. So she often runs away to avoid harassment and gets separated from her family, even her calf. The approach was abandoned. “We just felt it was unethical,” Whyte said.
He clicked on another diagram showing the normal social structure of a family group, where all the females stick together, led by a matriarch. If some form of birth control is imposed such that the females have fewer calves, instead of, say, a normal clan of eighteen, you could end up with only half a dozen individuals, and then it’s not the same social system.
“Normally, you’ve got all these older females,” Whyte said, “Some of them already adult with their own calves—there’s lot of supervision here. If something goes wrong with this little calf, all of these females would rush in and help. Even the younger ones, ten years old, get terribly excited about what happens to each other. The other advantage is there’s a learning process that these young females go through in a group like this. If you reduce the numbers, you’ve changed the whole fundamental system. There are gaps, opportunities lost. Is this fair to elephants?”
He pushed back in his chair. “None of it’s easy.”
There was more to using birth control than just going around zapping female elephants. To get the doses right, scientists would have to know which one was getting what, which meant they’d have to put a radio collar on each one in order to find them and give them the right boosters. To stabilize their numbers, about 70 percent of all breeding females have to be under treatment; this works out to 40 percent of the population …
“That’s the point,” Whyte said. “It’s just not possible in a population the size of Kruger’s. We’d be talking five thousand elephants.” I also wondered how attractive all those elephants wearing collars would look to tourists.
“Now, here’s an important point. You can’t reduce a population by contraception,” Whyte said. “If you sterilize every other animal in a population, you still have to wait for them to start dying to bring the numbers down.” Then there’s the political dimension.
“It would be extraordinarily expensive to do contraception in Kruger. We’ve got great numbers of rural people living on our boundaries. And we’d have to try and explain to these people that we’re going to be spending millions of rand on stopping the elephant population from breeding, when they look at that population and see protein. They’d much rather we use the money on schools and hospitals, and, if there are too many elephants, well, they see them as an edible resource.”
I felt the logical noose tightening.
In the end there won’t be enough land, translocation would always be strictly short-term, and birth control disturbs herd structure and dynamics. One can squirm about the alternatives, but what’s left? Doing nothing? About 1.3 million tourists visit annually, a big money earner for the parks system. Would they keep coming to Kruger if—
“If you don’t manage the elephants and other species start to fail and the tall trees get knocked over? Look, people do come to Kruger to look at trees. They’ll ask what the heck is going on here, why are you allowing this? That’s one of the things that concerns us. Tourism is our economic base. We are responsible to tourists, to South Africa, to the world in general. And we have a legal mandate to support biodiversity.”
That left culling.
He sighed. “It’s a dilemma. Do we manage for elephants or do we manage for biodiversity? There is no right or wrong answer. You just have to manage according to the objectives you have, that reflect your public. Your national values.”
That’s not an answer some would want to hear. Whyte was blunt.
“I’m of the opinion that a lot of these animal welfare groups, animal rights groups, are fundamentally dishonest. We’ve had these guys come to Kruger and sit down and we run through a presentation of the issues we’ve been talking about and explain the situation, but they just carry on saying the same things. Let’s face it, there’s something about elephants that drives people to put their hands in their pockets.”
Culling is not a prospect Whyte looks forward to; he knows what it’s like. He once wrote of the special empathy that intensifies the longer one is exposed to elephants, admitting that such powerful emotions “are not comfortable bedfellows with the concepts of killing these wonderful animals.”
“I’m horrified at the idea that you should go out and kill whales or seals just because you can,” Whyte said. “But this …” He looked at the pinup photos of elephants around his office. “This to me is an ecological issue. It’s about retaining certain species in the system.”
In early 2006, the South African environment ministry decided to put off any decision on culling, based on the findings of a panel of experts that it wasn’t clear whether or not the elephant population was too large. Was it a matter of postponing the inevitable? All I knew was that any future culling operation, whatever else it would accomplish, would add to Kruger’s already bulging ivory vaults. Trophy hunters might fantasize about how they’d love to help out by relieving a few old long-in-the-tooth bulls of their twin “burdens,” but those tuskers are exactly the ones tourists love to see. They wouldn’t be shot, Whyte assured me.
One of the ironies of culling is that it, unlike any of the alternative means of elephant population control, can pay for itself and more, covering the costs of killing some and helping to fund the conservation of the rest. That is, as long as you can sell the products. The hides are very valuable. There’s the meat, even elephant hair bracelets, and of course the ivory—if you have a market for it.
IN EARLY 2008, the South African government announced that it would lift its long-standing moratorium on elephant culling as a means of dealing with the species’ growing numbers. According to Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk, shooting elephants would be considered an “option of last resort.” Ian Whyte described the decision as a “tough call” when I reached him by phone to discuss it. But he felt the right decision had been made. Whyte, who’d retired the year before, said he was pleased to be “out of all the politics”—and relieved he wouldn’t have be involved in any future culling program that might be necessary.
IN LATE 2002 CITES had narrowly approved a proposal to permit another “onetime” sale of ivory, a total of sixty tons from stockpiles in Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, possibly as early as 2004. There were lots of “ifs” attached to the decision. Only raw ivory from government-owned stocks could be sold, and then only to trading partners verified by the secretariat to have controls sufficient to ensure that no ivory would be reexported, and proceeds from the sale had to be used for elephant and community conservation in the elephant range. Furthermore, MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants) had to supply baseline information on elephant population numbers and poaching activity. Instances of noncompliance or discovery of detrimental impacts on elephants would be enough to put a stop to the plan. Ban advocates were sure that taking this action would cause an upsurge in poaching, but proponents argued that as a one-off sale, rather than a reopening of trade, it was unlikely to stimulate more poaching than usual. Both China and Japan had applied to be assessed as prospective importing countries, but by late 2006 only Japan was recommended as a trading partner. Approval of the sale itself would be considered at the next meeting of the standing committee of CITES in 2007.