This is two-year old Donna.
She lives at a zoo in England and recently showed off her soccer, er football, skills.
We'll see if she can help England end its 46-year World Cup drought in 2014 (via TBL from THG).
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MADRID (AP) — Spain's king will fly to South America on Sunday for his first major trip since falling and breaking a hip on an elephant hunt seven weeks ago.
King Juan Carlos will arrive in Brazil and then go to Chile on Monday. He will be accompanied by several business leaders increase trade ties with Spain and reinforce commercial links with Latin America.
Spain often relies on the king as a high profile representative overseas, and the 74-year-old monarch will no doubt be eager to recover some of the respect he lost when it became known he had been on an elephant hunting safari as his country struggled with a deep financial crisis and crushing unemployment.
Many Spaniards were dumbfounded when news broke that the king had made a secret journey to hunt elephants in Botswana even though he is honorary president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund.
Such an opulent indulgence at a time when everyday Spaniards were braving a 24 percent unemployment rate and a shrinking economy, and fears the country could be the next after Greece, Ireland and Portugal to need a bailout caused stinging criticism of the monarch.
The Spanish public only learned of the safari when the king had to fly back to receive emergency medical attention for his broken hip. Faced with the incredulity that was reflected in the media, Juan Carlos made an unprecedented act of royal contrition: he apologized. "I am very sorry. I made a mistake. It won't happen again," he said as he left hospital looking sheepish and trying to placate a rare wave of outrage against him.
It was a poignant moment because the royal family had been under intense media scrutiny, for all the wrong reasons, and the embarrassment visible in the king's face only added to its woes.
The king's son-in-law, Inaki Urdangarin, is a suspect in a corruption case, accused of having used his position to embezzle several million euros in public contracts through a supposedly not-for-profit foundation he set up.
Then, over Easter, the king's 13-year-old grandson Felipe Juan Froilan shot himself in the foot with a shotgun, even though by law in Spain you must be 14 to handle a gun.
This four-day trip to Latin America marks the king's return to normal duty and follows his first public appearance after surgery as head of state when he reviewed troops at Spain's annual armed forces day Saturday.
"See if you could have withstood it," he joked with the media about standing to attention for 45 minutes after recovering from complex hip replacement surgery.
VIENNA (Reuters) - Scientists have succeeded for the first time in impregnating an elephant with frozen sperm, ultrasound pictures presented by Vienna's Schoenbrunn Zoo showed on Tuesday.
The scan shows a 10.6-centimetre-long (4.2 inch), five-month-old elephant foetus with its trunk, legs, tail, eyes and ears clearly discernible.
The foetus, which was scanned in April, is likely now 20 cm long, the zoo said, and is due to be born to 26-year-old African elephant Tonga in or around August 2013 after a pregnancy of about 630 days.
Elephants have been impregnated with fresh or refrigerated sperm in the past in an effort to protect endangered species, but frozen sperm can be transported further, and allows the female elephant to be inseminated at her most fertile time.
The sperm was taken from a sedated wild elephant in South Africa using electroejaculation in the project known internally as "Operation Frozen Dumbo," a zoo spokeswoman said.
It took eight months to clear customs on its way to France due to lack of an established procedure for such wares.
The project was a joint effort of Schoenbrunn Zoo, Berlin's Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, France's Beauval Zoo and Pittsburgh Zoo in the United States.
Both African and Asian species of elephant are endangered, especially the Asian, mainly due to poaching for meat and ivory tusks and destruction of their habitats.
Around 2,000 elephants live in zoos, and a further 15,000 Asian elephants are estimated to be kept privately, employed in the timber industry or living in temples.
"Since the survival of elephants in their natural habitat is under threat, zoos around the world are striving to preserve them," said Schoenbrunn Zoo Director Dagmar Schratter.
"Artificial insemination with the semen of a wild bull elephant is a chance to enrich the gene pool to further species conservation," she said, adding that there were five female elephants living in zoos to every one male.
(Reporting by Heinz-Peter Bader and Georgina Prodhan, editing by Paul Casciato)
These workers from the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, the longest study of wild elephants in the world, had to rescue this baby elephant from the well. They first had to shoo the mother away from her baby so she wouldn't injure the workers, who then had to wrap a rope around the baby's tail, then pull her out with the Jeep.
From the team's YouTube page:
We rescued this young eight months old calf early this week. Luckily the report came in early in the morning and we were able to get there quick before the mother was forced to leave by herders arriving to water their cattle. It was a happy ending as we were able to reunite the calf with her mother, Zombe.
Watch all the way through to see the reunion!
Perhaps feeling pressured by Singapore's new $32,000 cocktail, one of Thailand's more elite resort chains is releasing "one of the most expensive and exclusive" varities of coffee in the world.
The coffee is ground by hand and brewed at 93 degrees Celsius in a syphon machine "using technology developed in 1840 in Austria." According to the resort's press release, the result is a "very clean and flavourful taste," which is a curious way to describe coffee brewed through beans picked from elephant feces.
At $1,100 per kilo -- roughly $27 a cup, by my math -- it really ought to be the cleanest, most flavorful taste on the planet.
As the java warms your lips, you can imagine the elephant caretakers sinking their hand into mounds of waste to retrieve coffee beans digested by graceful pachyderms. Because that's how the beans are collected.(This is assuming you've already taken all of the Instagram photos needed to exhibit your rarified tastes.)
Does anyone actually buy this stuff?
Koshik the elephant can speak Korean.
Well, sort of.
According to the Associated Press, Koshik sticks his trunk in his mouth to mimic sounds, including the korean words for "hello" and "sit down."
Korean scientists believe he is doing this because he's lonely, and he's trying to figure out a way to bond with his keeper.
They think he is just vocalizing the sounds, rather than understanding the meaning.
Here's the video from AP in which Koshik appears to say "jo-wah," the Korean word for "good":
"Marauding pack of booze-addled elephants wreak havoc on Indian village." It's a story, or at least a headline, that's surprisingly common.
A few representative samples from the news reports on the latest incident: "Herd of Elephants Go on Drunken Rampage After Mammoth Booze Up," and, of course, "Trunk and Disorderly!"
Those headlines refer to an elephant bender that reportedly took place in India's Dumurkota village on Sunday (Nov. 4), and if it's never occurred to you before, the idea they convey is arresting — gigantic, angry drunks with tusks.
But destructive, town-smashing alcoholism has apparently afflicted Indian pachyderms since at least the 90s. In 2010, there was "Elephants on Drunken Rampage Kill 3 People;" in 2004, "6 Drunk Elephants Electrocute Themselves;" and in 1999, the understated, but seminal, BBC headline: "Drunken Elephants Trample Village."
The Times of India tells the latest tale this way: "… a herd of 50-odd inebriated jumbos ransacked three houses and damaged paddy crops on Sunday. The strong smell of mahua drink drew the elephants out of the forest, and they raided the shop selling the drink.
The herd wasn't happy, even after guzzling down 18 containers of mahua, and ransacked the adjoining huts in search of more."
So have elephants really hit rock bottom?
It is certainly true that Indian elephants frequently clash with humans, damaging homes and sometimes killing people as they struggle to adjust to shrinking habitats. Marshall Jones, senior conservation adviser at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, estimated that as many as 300 people die in conflicts with elephants every year in India, while up to 200 elephants lose their lives to humans annually. [Killer Elephants in India: Why They Attack]
What isn't clear, though, is whether some wild elephants have really developed a jonesing taste for alcohol, as so many news reports allege. Also uncertain is whether elephants, if they did get into a store of liquor, would drink enough to bump an ordinary rampage up to a classifiable drunken rampage.
Science hasn't shied away from drunken elephants. In 1984, psychiatrist Ronald Siegel found that both chained circus elephants and elephants living in wildlife preserves would readily drink an unflavored, 7-percent-alcohol-by-volume (ABV) solution, even when other food and water sources were available. When he flavored solutions with mint, a favorite taste for elephants, they lapped up a 10-percent concentration, but refused to drink anything stronger.
In a 2005 study that put to rest the myth that African elephants get drunk on fermented fruit in the wild, the late Steve Morris, a biologist at the University of Bristol, did the math on elephant intoxication. He calculated that a 3.3-ton (3,000-kilogram) elephant, which would be skinny for a male Indian elephant and mid-range for a female, would have to speed-drink at least 2.6 gallons (10 liters) of a 7-percent ABV drink to get a behavior-modifying buzz.
The alluring brew that reportedly fueled the latest rampage is mahua, a drink made from the sweet flowers of the tropical mahua tree (Madhuca longifolia) that ranges in alcohol content from 20 to 40 percent, according to a 1998 study in the journal Alcohol Health and Research World.
That's above the limit the captive elephants would tolerate in 1984, and Shermin de Silva, a cofounder of Sri Lanka's Elephant Forest and Environmental Trust who studies conflict between elephants and humans, says she has a difficult time imagining that a wild elephant would willingly consume enough hard liquor to get drunk, unless the booze had an exceptionally sweet and appealing taste. Though the flowers of the mahua tree are sweet in their raw form, the drink is often described as pungent.
"[Elephants] are very picky, even about the quality of the water they drink," de Silva wrote in an email to Life's Little Mysteries. "A more likely interpretation [than a rampage provoked and fueled by booze] is that they broke into some houses and happened to consume some alcohol, after which they broke into some more houses."
Other drunken elephant reports have the animals lusting after Indian rice wine, which would likely have lower alcohol content than mahua, possibly below 10 percent in weaker brews. De Silva said elephants do have a predilection for invading rice paddies, an attraction she speculates may carry over to fermented rice products.
But most attacks on humans and raids on farmland are committed by sober elephants. In those cases, destructive behavior can't be glibly explained by drunkenness. Instead, it seems to be rooted in the confusions and resource shortages that elephants face as humans take an increasing share of their habitat.
Secret footage recorded by an animal rights group shows an elderly elephant being beaten by staff at Bobby Roberts Super Circus.
Circus owner Bobby Roberts has been convicted at Northampton Crown Court of three counts of causing unnecessary suffering to Anne, a 59 year old Asian elephant in his care. His wife Moira was cleared of all charges.
A camera hidden inside the barn by members of Animal Defenders International (ADI) recorded Anne's treatment between January 21 and February 15 last year.
The court heard that ADI made the footage public on 26 March last year, and it was quickly followed up by the police and RSPCA.
Prosecutor Helen Law said Anne was kept inside a barn at the Roberts' farm in Polebrook, Cambridgeshire, where she was permanently chained up with shackles on two of her legs.
The court heard the animal became so distressed by her confinement that she was caught on camera swaying from side to side - a clear sign of mental unrest.
SEE ALSO: The Leggiest Female On Earth Lives Near Silicon Valley
SEE ALSO: Incredible Videos Of The World's Most Bizarre Natural Phenomena
Naomi Campbell is suing the Daily Telegraph for libel over an article claiming she organised an elephant polo tournament in India.
A spokeswoman for Campbell emphatically denied that the model, who campaigns against animal cruelty, had planned an elephant polo tournament in Jodhpur as stated by the article on 3 November.
The article, headed "Elephant polo at Campbell's party criticised", said celebrity guests at a party thrown by Campbell for her partner, the Russian billionaire Vladimir Doronin, would play the controversial sport in three-a-side teams. The online version of the article has been removed from the Telegraph website.
A spokeswoman for Campbell described the claim as "completely untrue" and said lawyers in London had been instructed to take action.
Campbell formally filed her libel claim against Telegraph Media Group, the publisher of the Daily Telegraph, at the high court on London on 5 December. She has instructed the London law firm Michael Simkins over the article.
Gideon Benaim, a partner of Michael Simkins LLP, said: "We have issued legal proceedings on behalf of Ms Campbell against the Telegraph, who were the original publishers of these allegations. We are instructed to pursue this matter until it is satisfactorily resolved. The allegations caused damage to our client, apart from the widespread repetition of the allegations, there were also protests outside the venue, and Indian government departments who wrote to us.
"However, it seems to me that government authorities and animal welfare groups in India were simply reacting to the untrue claims that had been made. The simple truth is that there was no plan for elephant polo. Ms Campbell did not cancel it because it was never going to happen in the first place. We have as yet no idea where the false claims originated from, perhaps the Telegraph will let us know in due course."
Telegraph Media Group declined to comment.
Campbell fought a marathon legal battle with the Daily Mirror stretching back to 2001, when she won a case for invasion of privacy, breach of confidence and breach of the Data Protection Act after the paper published an article and photographs of her leaving a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
The court of appeal later overturned that ruling. Then, in 2004, the House of Lords found by a majority of three to two that Campbell's privacy was invaded by the Trinity Mirror-owned paper.
After taking the issue of recovery of success fees by lawyers to the European court of human rights, the Mirror won a unanimous ruling in 2011 that this represented a significant violation of freedom of expression in relation to the Campbell case.
The Daily Mirror was faced with a total bill for £850,000, of which £365,000 represented success fees – although the newspaper reached a settlement on costs for a total of £500,000.
The ECHR said the requirement to pay Campbell's success fees was "disproportionate".
However, the ECHR ruled by six votes to one that there was no breach of the Daily Mirror's freedom of expression in the earlier UK court judgment that the paper had invaded Campbell's privacy.
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Animal rights groups have agreed to pay $9.3 million to the company behind Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus to settle a fight over alleged abuse of elephants.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Animal Welfare Institute, the Fund for Animals, and others sued Feld Entertainment in 2000 over claims the circus was mistreating its performing elephants and violating the Endangered Species Act, Courthouse News Service reported Friday.
In turn, the circus sued the animal rights groups, claiming they violated federal racketeering law by paying a former circus employee $190,000 to testify that elephants had been abused.
A judge ruled in favor of Feld Entertainment in 2009, saying the case was brought based on untruthful testimony from the former employee, prompting the parties to file papers last week to dismiss the case.
The circus-owning company will be walking away with $9.3 million from the ASPCA as part of the settlement, according to CNS.
The ASPCA said it in a statement the settlement was in its best interest, saying continuing litigation would have been costly. Feld Entertainment chairman Kenneth Feld bashed animal activists for "attacking our family, our company, and our employees for decades because they oppose animals in circuses," CNS reported.
He called the settlement "a vindication."
The circus has long been criticized for the way it treats animals.
A website called Ringling Bros. Beats Animals has posted videos that allegedly show elephants being abused and is filled with allegations against the circus.
And the ASPCA has an entire page dedicated to criticizing the circus for the way it treats its non-human stars.
DON'T MISS: The Bully From 'A Christmas Story' Says He's Been Tricked Out Of A Lot Of Cash >
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The Vatican defended itself on Wednesday against accusations it encourages illegal ivory trafficking, telling elephant lovers it would do what it could to help combat "a serious and unjustifiable phenomenon" but warning campaigners not to expect too much.
The publication of a National Geographic report in September 2012 on illegal ivory pointed the finger at the Vatican, noting the use of ivory in making precious religious tokens and accusing Pope Benedict XVI of accepting or giving ivory items as gifts.
The report sparked a flurry of angry letters and the Vatican responded Wednesday with a long and personal response penned by its spokesman Federico Lombardi to "friends of the elephants".
Lombardi, 70, said he had "never heard or even read a word that would encourage the use of ivory for devotional objects" since he began working at the Vatican and had "never seen a gift in ivory given by the Pope."
Shops within the tiny Vatican state do not sell items made of ivory and nearby stores which flog religious items to tourists are on Italian territory and do not come under the Holy See's jurisdiction, he said.
"The 'Vatican' has no responsibility and no control to exercise over... businesses that are located in the neighbourhood around the Vatican," he added.
The massacre of elephants for their ivory "is a serious problem that Christians can and should unite against, as against all problems concerning the safeguarding of creation," he said.
However, "it is impossible to think that the 'Vatican' might have at its disposal powerful and effective tools for combatting the massacre of elephants by destroying the burgeoning illegal trade in ivory," he added.
Lombardi said the pope intervenes frequently on environmental awareness and assured campaigners that the Vatican would do more to engage Catholics on the issue of illegal ivory trafficking, including launching a series of information programmes on Radio Vatican on the subject.
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Naomi Campbell has received an apology and "substantial" libel damages from the Daily Telegraph over an article that wrongly claimed she organised an elephant polo tournament in India.
The supermodel complained that the article, published on 3 November 2012 under the headline "Elephant polo at Campbell's party criticised", damaged her reputation by falsely stating that she planned the controversial sport for a birthday party in Jodhpur.
The article was republished widely online and prompted protests against Campbell by animal rights groups. Indian government departments wrote to Campbell's representatives to complain, according to her lawyers.
In a statement read at the high court on Thursday, Gideon Benaim, the lawyer for Campbell, said the Telegraph had agreed to apologise and withdrawn the allegations.
In a statement at the high court on Thursday, Campbell said: "There were never plans to hold an elephant polo tournament, so that allegations should not have been published. However I am glad that the matter has been resolved and I accept the newspaper's apology."
Benaim said in the statement that the article had caused "a storm of adverse publicity" against the supermodel.
He added: "Readers were told that elephant polo was cruel and depended upon the violent abuse of the animals by the mahouts who trained them, and that they were consistently kept in chains and driven insane by their treatment. In fact, this story was story was simply false and the criticisms unfounded. There were never any plans for an elephant polo tournament at the birthday celebrations and Ms Campbell had neither organised nor requested the organisation of any such tournament."
The Daily Telegraph made no effort to contact Campbell before publishing the story, he said.
Speaking outside the high court after the hearing, Benaim declined to reveal the sum of the substantial damages and legal costs.
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Malaysian authorities have a possible elephant murder mystery on their hands after three more pygmy elephants reportedly were found dead on the island of Borneo Wednesday (Jan. 30).
The grim discovery brings the death toll to 13 this month, and according to the AP, authorities are investigating suspicions that the diminutive elephants were poisoned.
Also called Bornean elephants, these creatures are the most endangered subspecies of Asian elephant. While other male Asian elephants can grow up to 9.8 feet (3 meters), male Bornean elephants grow to less than 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) and they have bigger ears and rounder bellies, according to the conservation organization World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Researchers initially believed the babyish-looking mammals were the descendants of captive elephants brought to the island a few centuries ago. Other evidence, however, suggests that the pygmy elephants are a genetically distinct subspecies that arrived thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene Epoch by way of a land bridge. There are thought to be just 1,200 of them in Borneo today, mostly concentrated in Sabah, the Malaysian state at the northeastern corner of the island. [Gallery: The Pygmy Elephants of Borneo]
Though it's still unclear who or what might be responsible for the recent spate of elephant deaths, WWF officials noted that the population has been increasingly threatened by habitat fragmentation, and all the corpses reportedly have been found in areas where forests are being transformed into plantations within the Gunung Rara reserve in Sabah.
"Conversions result in fragmentation of the forests, which in turn results in loss of natural habitat for elephant herds, thus forcing them to find alternative food and space, putting humans and wildlife in direct conflict," environmentalist Dato' Dr Dionysius S K Sharma, executive director of the WWF's Malaysia division, said in a statement. "All conversion approvals need to be reviewed by the Sabah Forestry Department and assessed not purely from commercial, but the endangered species and landscape ecology perspectives."
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Smuggling the world's largest land animal across an international border sounds like a mammoth undertaking, but activists say that does not stop traffickers supplying Asian elephants to Thai tourist attractions.
Unlike their heavily-poached African cousins -- whose plight is set to dominate Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) talks in Bangkok next week -- Asian elephants do not often make the headlines.
But the species is also under threat, as networks operate a rapacious trade in wild elephants to meet the demands of Thailand's tourist industry.
Camps and zoos featuring elephants tightrope walking, playing football or performing in painting contests employ almost 4,000 domesticated elephants for the amusement of tourists.
Conservation activists accuse the industry of using illicitly-acquired animals to supplement its legal supply, with wild elephants caught in Myanmar and sold across the border into one of around 150 camps.
"Even the so-called rescue charities are trying to buy elephants," said John Roberts of the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation.
Domestic elephants in Thailand -- where the pachyderm is a national symbol -- have been employed en masse in the tourist trade since they found themselves unemployed in 1989 when logging was banned.
Just 2,000 of the animals remain in the wild.
Prices have exploded with elephants now commanding between 500,000 and two million baht ($17,000 to $67,000) per baby, estimates suggest.
The number of baby elephants "coming into the system" is far higher than would be possible "from actual breeding", said Roberts, whose group decided to stop buying elephants seven years ago and now has 26 residents.
"I cannot see a way to buy an elephant which doesn't cause another elephant to be smuggled," he added.
Between 50 and 100 wild baby or young female elephants are sold from Myanmar each year, according to estimates by British charity Elephant Family.
The group's head of conservation, Dan Bucknell, told AFP that while some trafficked elephants may be taken elsewhere, the majority enter the Thai market.
"Thailand is certainly a hub," he said.
Smuggling such a large mammal should in theory require elaborate planning to avoid the police but in reality traffickers just "do it over a normal road", said wildlife trade researcher Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes university.
"Elephants can be in a truck or even walk" across the Thai border in front of complicit customs officers and border guards, he said.
Demand is not only threatening the 4,000 to 5,000 wild elephants in Myanmar, but is also hitting populations in Thailand's other neighbour Laos.
Young domestic elephants are exported across the border, furthering the decline of a population of around 480 animals, said Gilles Maurer of the group ElephantAsia.
Laos, known as the "land of a million elephants", only has between 300 and 500 wild pachyderms left and Maurer said that as the domestic population shrinks, "there is a strong risk" that poachers will turn to them.
Last year Thai authorities conducted several raids on elephant camps and seized some 25 animals -- 19 remain under their protection.
"It is likely the 19 seized elephants were smuggled wild animals as their paperwork did not match up," said forest ranger Pradung Jitraon, of Thailand's National Parks department, who participated in the operation.
Activists have welcomed the initiative but are also calling for broader reforms. "The system now is so weak," said Petch Manopawitr of the World Wildlife Fund in Thailand.
Thailand needs "more control, more transparent monitoring of the population, of what they do in terms of new born elephants", he said, calling for a proper database of elephants, using DNA testing or microchips.
Such a system, he added, would allow foreigners to visit elephant camps safe in the knowledge they are not "harming or threatening the wild population".
SEE ALSO: Poachers Could Wipe Out African Elephants In A Decade
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A total of 86 elephants — including 33 pregnant females and 15 young — were killed in Chad last week. The 50 or so Arabic-speaking poachers shot the animals with machine guns while riding on horses, then hacked out their tusks and left the animals to die.
These are probably the same group of poachers who killed 300 elephants in February of last year, Bas Huijbregts, head of WWF's campaign against illegal wildlife trade in the region said to the AFP.
Cameroon has deployed military helicopters and troops to its national parks to protect the animals, Reuters's reports.
"The killing of 86 elephants, including pregnant cows, is evidence of the callous brutality demanded to feed the appetite of the ivory trade," Celine Sissler-Bienvenu, head of IFAW in France and Francophone Africa, said in a statement.
The booming ivory trade — mostly in jewelry and ornamental items — is driving an increase in elephant poaching. According to NBC News:
From about 11,500 elephants illegally killed in 2010 in areas observed by the Monitoring Illegal Killing of Elephants programme, estimates for 2011 and 2012 rose to around 17,000.
The money from this illegal ivory trade is possibly being used to fund armed groups, according to the WWF.
Central Africa has become increasingly inhospitable to forest elephants, according to a study published March 4 in PLoS One that found that 62 percent of the species was killed by poachers between 2002 and 2011. The study — by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and more than a dozen other institutions — also found that 30 percent of the elephants’ prior habitat has become inhospitable during that timeframe.
Forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) live exclusively in central Africa, while savannah, or bush, elephants (L. africana) can be found in the southern, eastern and western stretches of the of the continent. Scientists had thought that forest and savannah elephants were the same species, but a genetic study published in 2010 proved that they are two separate species. Forest elephants are roughly 15 percent smaller than their savannah cousins and have harder, straighter tusks.
The new study — which will help conservationists understand the unique needs of the newly recognized species — required a massive effort. More than 60 scientists spent a combined 91,600 person-days in the field. They walked more than 13,000 kilometers through Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Gabon and the Republic of the Congo and collected more than 11,000 samples — primarily dung — over a 10-year period. The density of dung samples dropped dramatically in that period, which is how the scientists calculated the 62 percent population decline.
The study also revealed major changes in where forest elephants can be found. Before the 1970s, nearly 60 percent of all forest elephants lived in the DRC, while 18 percent lived in Gabon. As of 2011, according to the study, the DRC’s population had been poached so heavily that it only contained 19 percent while 52 percent of all remaining forest elephants lived in Gabon.
Other surveys released separately help illustrate just how many elephants we’re talking about. In early February the WCS revealed that Gabon’s Minkebe Park has lost 11,100 elephants since 2004, most of which were probably killed in the past five years, a big change for a country were poaching was at the lowest levels in the region. Another survey released later that month found that the supposedly well-protected Okapi Faunal Reserve in the DRC has lost 5,100 elephants in the past 15 years. Many of them were killed during the worst years of that country’s 1996-2003 civil war.
Although most raw, unworked ivory, regardless of species, is destined for China, a previous WCS study, published in the July-December 2012 issue of the journal Pachyderm (pdf), found that Japan is the only market with a preference for the harder forest-elephant ivory. Softer savannah-elephant ivory is not considered durable enough for traditional hanko (personal name seals) or bachi (carved plucking tools for three-stringed musical instruments called shamisen).
Bomb tests generations ago could indirectly help fight illegal poaching of African elephants, new research shows.
Nuclear weapons tested in the atmosphere in the 1950s and '60s spread a radioactive variety of carbon worldwide, which was picked up by plants during photosynthesis and then deposited in the bodies of herbivores like African elephants. By looking at the levels of this carbon isotope — known as carbon-14— in elephant tusks and ivory, researchers can find out how old they are. (Isotopes are versions of elements that have differing numbers of neutrons in their nuclei.)
Knowing the age of elephant tusks is important, since many regulations of ivory trade are date-specific. In the United States, for example, ivory taken prior to a 1989 worldwide ban on African elephant tusks may be legally traded, while new ivory is illegal to traffic, said Kevin Uno, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.
"I don't necessarily think this will save the elephants, but it's a critical tool to fight poaching of elephants," said Uno, co-author of a study detailing the technique, published today (July 1) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A critical tool
Atmospheric bomb testing caused a spike in carbon-14 that has slowly declined in the past 50 years. By measuring the concentration of this type of carbon, researchers are given two possible dates for the age of the sample, before and after the spike on the curve of carbon-14 concentrations. To figure out which is the right age, researchers have to sample in two locations on the ivory, said Uno, who performed the research while he was doctoral student at the University of Utah.
Specifically, researchers test one part of the tusk that is younger, and one that is older. They can do this by following the grain of the ivory, which shows which way the tusk grew. This allows them to figure out which of the two dates is the right one, Uno said.
Luckily, the technique can work with a small amount of ivory — "just a pinch" of material, Uno said. This makes it easier to test on jewelry or ivory figurines, he added.
The technique complements another developed in 2004 that uses DNA from tusks to find out where the tusks came from. That method "has the 'where'; we are the 'when,'" Uno told LiveScience.
"This is a very well-designed study and its results could prove very important for addressing illegal trade," said Sam Wasser, a researcher at the University of Washington who developed the DNA-based technique but wasn't involved in the new study.
By combining the techniques, researchers could collaborate with wildlife rangers to protect certain hotspots, Wasser told LiveScience. "The best way to stop the killing [of elephants] is to identify the major poaching hotspots and target them in a concerted law enforcement effort that includes international cooperation," he said. [Elephant Images: The Biggest Beasts on Land]
Poaching getting worse
Poaching of African elephants is "as bad as it's ever been," and getting worse, Uno said. There were an estimated 46.5 tons (42,200 kilograms) of ivory seized in 2011, with even higher numbers suspected in 2012, Wasser said. That suggests as many as 50,000 elephants were killed to provide the ivory seized in 2011. "With a total population of 400,000 elephants, this is a very serious situation," Wasser said.
In other words, if the rate of poaching isn't slowed, African elephants could be mostly gone within 10 years.
Trafficking is carried out in part by large criminal networks and is a multibillion-dollar industry. It's driven largely by demand in China for ivory and rhino horns, which are valued for the supposed medicinal benefits. The United States also is a destination for illegal ivory, according to the study.
Two things must be done to stop poaching, said Richard Ruggiero, an expert on elephant poaching with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who was not involved in the research. The first is "to address the growing demand and markets in importing countries," he said in an email interview. "This causes the problem and is the disease that must be treated. This is a question of education, public outreach and awareness, and the willingness of governments and consumers to come to grips with reality."
But curbing demand is too slow, Ruggiero said. Secondly, "we need to be much better at providing security for elephants, to assure detection, apprehension and prosecution of offenders, be they poachers, traffickers or corrupt officials around the world," he added.
President Barack Obama announced today (July 1) a major initiative to fight illegal wildlife trafficking. While on a visit to Tanzania, he will sign an executive order to convene a task force to address the issue, focusing in part on poaching in Africa, according to the White House. To that end, "the U.S. Department of State will provide an additional $10 million in regional and bilateral training and technical assistance in Africa to combat wildlife trafficking," the White House statement said.
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If, for whatever reason, you need to get an elephant's attention, you can probably just point. A new study shows that elephants can understand human pointing gestures — an ability that sets them apart from other animals, like chimpanzees, that you would think would get the point of pointing, but don't.
University of St. Andrews researchers Anna Smet and Richard Byrne recruited 11 captive elephants for their study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology. All of the animals belong to a safari company and are used to give rides to tourists near Victoria Falls in South Africa. While the elephants were trained to respond to voice commands, they had not been coached to understand pointing gestures.
In the researchers' experiments, two buckets were placed before an elephant, with one containing food. An experimenter pointed at the bucket with food in it, and the researchers watched to see which bucket the elephant approached first. The perceptive pachyderms tended to follow the experimenter's pointing arm to the food reward.
"What really surprised us is that they did not apparently need to learn anything," Smet said in a statement. "Their understanding was as good on the first trial as the last, and we could find no sign of learning over the experiment."
The elephants could follow the experimenter's pointed gesture to the right bucket even when her standing position was moved around (to make sure the elephants weren't just picking the bucket she was closest to). And the elephants were generally not able to correctly choose the food bucket if the experimenter merely looked at the bucket without pointing at it.
"The most plausible account of our elephant's ability to interpret even subtle human pointing gestures as communicative is that human pointing, as we presented it, taps into elephants' natural communication system," the authors wrote. "We suggest that the functional equivalent of pointing might take the form of referential indication with the trunk."
Other studies have shown that dogs (and domestic cats, to an extent) also understand pointing gestures without training. In contrast, both chimpanzees and wolves fail pointing tests, even when experimenters try to train them. It makes sense that domestic animals, which have developed a dependence on humans for food, would be more attuned to human gestures than undomesticated animals. But elephants are not domesticated in the true sense of the word — the elephants in this study, for example, forage for their own food when not giving rides to tourists. So why do they seem to have an innate understanding of pointing?
"What elephants share with humans is that they live in an elaborate and complex network in which support, empathy and help for others are critical for survival," Byrne said in a statement. "It may be only in such a society that the ability to follow pointing has adaptive value, or, more generally, elephant society may have selected for an ability to understand when others are trying to communicate with them, and they are thus able to work out what pointing is about when they see it."
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Poachers in Zimbabwe have killed more than 300 elephants and countless other safari animals by cyanide poisoning, The Telegraph has learned.
The full extent of the devastation wreaked in Hwange, the country's largest national park, has been revealed by legitimate hunters who discovered what conservationists say is the worst single massacre in southern Africa for 25 years.
Pictures taken by the hunters, which have been obtained exclusively by The Telegraph, reveal horrific scenes.
Parts of the national park, whose more accessible areas are visited by thousands of tourists each year, can be seen from the air to be littered with the deflated corpses of elephants, often with their young calves dead beside them, as well as those of other animals.
There is now deep concern that the use of cyanide — first revealed in July, but on a scale that has only now emerged — represents a new and particularly damaging technique in the already soaring poaching trade.
Zimbabwean authorities said that 90 animals were killed this way. But the hunters who captured these photographs say they have conducted a wider aerial survey and counted the corpses of more than 300.
Poachers killed the elephants over the past three months by lacing waterholes and salt licks with cyanide.
Animals are drawn to them during the dry season in the already arid and remote south-eastern section of the 5,660-square mile park.
After the elephants died, often collapsing just a few yards from the source, lions, hyenas and vultures which fed on their carcasses were also struck down, as were other animals such as kudu and buffalo that shared the same waterholes.
Zimbabwe's authorities say the cyanide has been planted by villagers who sell the elephants' tusks for around £300 each to cross-border traders. They can be resold in South Africa for up to £10,000 a pair, according to court papers relating one recent incident, sometimes re-emerging as carved artefacts such as bangles in Cape Town's craft markets.
Zimbabwe has one of Africa's biggest surviving elephant populations, since herds in neighbouring regions of Eastern and Central Africa have been severely damaged by poaching, and half of the country's estimated 80,000 elephants are thought to live in Hwange.
Conservationists say the African elephant is so much under threat from habitat loss, conflict with humans and illegal poaching and hunting that on present trends it could die out within 50 years.
In 2011, at least 17,000 African elephants were killed for their tusks according to Cites, the international body that focuses on endangered species.
Ivory is highly prized as a "white gold" in Asian countries where a growing middle class is seeking safe investments, and United Nations wildlife experts say the trade in illegal ivory has more than doubled since 2007.
The poisoning was first uncovered by a European hunter and his Zimbabwean guides who spotted a dead cow and her calf as they flew over the park in a helicopter.
As they flew lower they saw scores more. The corpses of endangered white-backed vultures which had fed on the toxic carcasses were dotted near each dead elephant.
"We couldn't believe our eyes," one hunter, who did not wish to be named for fear of reprisals from poachers, told The Telegraph. "We thought at first that they must have been shot. There were too many to have died of thirst or hunger."
They flew back to camp and drove into the park after alerting government rangers as they went. "We found that elephants we saw from the air were not shot, but the tusks were gone," the hunter said.
His group spotted a man walking into the park carrying a four-gallon bucket and a packet. They watched him dig a hole for the bucket in the sand, lower it in and then mix powder from the packet into the water.
Zimbabwe's National Parks and Wildlife Authority sent investigators and police to the area, where there are normally few patrols. The water was discovered to contain cyanide — available cheaply for use in informal gold mining that is conducted locally.
After further investigation police arrested eight men from a village in the Tsholotsho district which borders the park, along with a number of fellow officers who were allegedly bribed to ignore the poachers, and a Harare-based cyanide distributor to whom more than 100lbs of the poison were traced.
So far, 14 people have been arrested since the first poisoning was discovered.
As news of the killings spread, the Zimbabwean authorities took usually swift and harsh action — putting captured poachers before the courts where they were given sentences of up to 16 years in prison along with stiff fines.
When Saviour Kasukawere, Zimbabwe's environment minister, visited a village just outside the park two weeks ago she was told that the poachers had acted out of desperation as their crops had failed and tourism fees from hunters and safari operators had dried up.
Caroline Washaya-Moyo, a spokesman for Zimbabwe's National Parks, said 10 more poisoned elephants were found last week, none of which had been dead for more than three weeks, suggesting that the poisoning had not stopped.
She said she was "surprised" by the report that 300 elephants had died, but conceded that ZimParks only begun its own aerial survey last week. "We did find that (looking for carcasses) is more efficient from the air," she said.
Police have discovered tusks near a railway line which passes through Hwange and last week found more, hidden in a concealed compartment of a luxury bus on the way to South Africa.
Some of the carcasses have now been burned, Mrs Washaya-Moyo said, but others had been kept for further investigation.
Mrs Washaya-Moyo said they were struggling to persuade those in custody to identify the organisers. "It is a pity that they all seem so reluctant to identify the big people involved, as ivory, like the rhino horn, is not used in Zimbabwe. It is used by foreigners," she said.
Tom Milliken, programme leader for the Elephant and Rhino Traffic network, a conservation organisation, said he was "astounded" by the scale of the killings. "This is the largest massacre of elephant in this part of the world for the last 25 years," he said.
"This (use of buckets of water) is seductive for elephants at this dry time of year when they're looking hard for water. Cyanide is a new weapon against wildlife."
Tim Snow, a South African expert on wildlife poisoning, said the emergence of cyanide in poaching was "really scary".
"Quite apart from these elephants' deaths, what about all the other animals using that water source and scavenging from those corpses? The knock-on effect must be horrendous," he said.
Cyanide has not been used in poaching before because in most countries it is strictly controlled and its use in agriculture had been phased out, he said.
"In Zimbabwe, because of the challenges they are facing, I would imagine it's a free for all," he said. "If this is a gold mining area then that's where the investigators should be looking. If controls are not put in place, its use could become rife."
Conservationists say ZimParks needs 10 times the number of rangers it currently has to be able to prevent cyanide from being used again.
Thys de Vries, one of Zimbabwe's best known professional hunters and conservationists, said: "There are some very good people out there but they are short of resources and need help."
Katherine Connor's life changed forever when she left her job in London and embarked on a trip around Asia 10 years ago.
Shortly into her travels, she formed a bond with Boon Lott, a three-month-old elephant calf whom she met while volunteering in an elephant hospital in northern Thailand. As she fought to keep him healthy, raising money to prevent a premature separation from his mother, she decided to dedicate her life to protecting abused elephants like him.
"Every place I visited — so-called sanctuaries — were all about making money, exploiting elephants, bringing in the tourists and keeping tourists happy,"she said to National Geographic Traveler's George W. Stone."Many people do not realize that riding in a chair on the back of an elephant is seriously damaging and painful for the elephant."
In 2005 she founded the Boon Lott Elephant Sanctuary, in honor of her first pachyderm friend. Located on hundreds of acres of fenced-off forestland in northern Thailand, the sanctuary allows the elephants to roam and grow in their natural habitat.
Connor's story captured the hearts of thousands of National Geographic Traveler readers, who after a month of voting have named her the 2013 People's Choice Traveler of the Year.
"I am deeply honored to have won the People’s Choice Award. It is a very exciting opportunity to raise the profile for Thailand’s elephants and educate the public about the cruelty elephants suffer when forced to entertain tourists traveling to Thailand," she said.
She hopes her work will inspire others to explore and preserve the world around them.
"There’s an education out there that we can’t get from sitting behind a desk—and travel is central to this,"Connor said to Stone."We have to challenge ourselves."