Ivory Trade

From "Elephant Memories" by Cynthia Moss:

These facts and figures on ivory, even in my mind, tend to distance one from the elephant, but ivory statistics... represent a definite number of dead elephants... natural mortality at this point cannot possibly feed the current demand for ivory. To meet the demand for 825 tons of ivory per year a minimum of 70,000 elephants have to die... And that is only the elephants with tusks; thousands of calves also die because of the loss of their mothers, bringing the estimated total up to at least 80,000 elephants each year...

It is not the numbers alone that are depressing; equally disturbing is what has happened to the populations that remain. Poachers systematically take the animals with the largest tusks, so the first to go are the males and the older matriarchs... When the older elephants are finished they start on the medium-sized ones and eventually have to do with the young elephants with very small tusks... According to the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Unit of IUCN, the mean tusk weight of ivory imported into Japan dropped from 35.8 pounds in 1979 to 21.3 pounds in 1982...

Facts about African elephants:

• Gestation period (懷孕期): 22 months
• Life span: Up to 70 years

Additional source: WWF