GPS Trackers Hidden in Fake Ivory Tusks to Track Elephant Poachers
10 Sep 2015Because of poaching, over 30,000 African elephants die every year with a lot of their ivory tusks being found hundreds of miles away from them. East Africa can be thought of as ground zero for poaching. In fact, the Tanzanian government announced in June that there was over 60 percent of elephants lost in their country in the past five years going from around 110,000 to less than 44,000. There was a 48 percent loss of elephants reported for neighboring Mozambique.
In order to track the poached tusks route,
Bryan Christy, investigative journalist, commissioned a taxidermist to make a couple of fake ivory tusks where he would then embed a GPS tracking device in each.
The tusks are intended to hunt down the people who are killing the elephants to learn the routes they follow, what ports they leave from, the ships they travel on and the countries and cities it transits and ends up.
The tusks are being sent to a part of the world that is far too dangerous for the investigators to go. Additionally, the tusks were placed on a path that they knew was the path where ivory was transported from Garamba National Park making its way North into Sudan.
Christy and his team tracked it from country to country north. They felt it was a creative and exciting idea being able to watch it move north and avoid all roads as it headed north to Sudan.
GPS tracking makes it possible to safely follow the ivory trade, track it, and collect more data. Christy likes to refer to it as ‘Mission Impossible’ like technology, which still records locations even during loss signals.
According to Christy, China is the place that the ivory ends up in the most and is the biggest customer of illegal ivory. In fact, China bought 60 tons of ivory a few years ago from Africa and it was this particular purchase that raised the thought that ivory was hitting the market again.
However, China has agreed to cease the trade.
It is a very complex issue in central Africa since terrorists and rebel militia are using ivory to trade for medicine and arms, reports NPR. “It’s a ‘human’ problem resulting in violence and death”, states Christy.
Recently, China announced it will be phasing out ivory product production and sales.
Once China is out of the Ivory game, it will likely result in an economic collapse for the cost of ivory and will soon lead to ivory sales becoming obsolete or reduce its role at least as a means of financing war. Taking China out of the illegal ivory market will be a game-changer.
Comments are closed.