People have been waging war on one another for one reason or another since the dawn of time. We’re a warlike species, yes. And a myriad of other species are also learning that at their own cost, stresses Dominic Jermey, director general of the Zoological Society of London and a former British ambassador to war-torn Afghanistan.
In a poignant op-ed, Jermey laments the brutal and rapacious excesses of the global wildlife trade, a multibillion dollar industry that is driving a plethora of species extinct from beleaguered pangolins in Africa to embattled sun bears in Southeast Asia. “The illegal wildlife trade has catastrophic impacts on people and animals,” Jermey notes. “The annihilation of wildlife by organised criminal gangs is violent, bloody, corrupt and insidious.”
The continued slaughter of wildlife, he explains, “robs communities of their resources, their independence, their opportunities and their dignity. It strips their homes of beauty and diversity. It may even cost some people their lives. And we are all losers as the creatures with which we share this planet are pillaged to extinction.”
A stark assessment, but sadly all too true. Of pangolins alone, an estimated 1 million have been hunted and killed in the past decade. Throughout their ranges in Africa and Asia, these placid anteaters, which curl up into a defensive ball at the first sign of trouble, are poached relentlessly for their scales, to which many people in China, Vietnam and elsewhere falsely attribute medicinal properties.
African elephants are hardly faring better. Anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 of them are slaughtered each year for their ivory. Over the past decade alone an estimated 140,000 elephants have been killed for their tusks and other body parts in Africa, driving the species precariously close to being critically endangered. While there were 490,000 elephants on the continent a decade ago, there are now only around 350,000. And yet another African elephant is killed for its tusks every 25 minutes.
And these are just two species out of thousands that are facing the ever-growing threat of extinction at the hands of people the world over. The planet is undergoing “an extremely high degree of population decay in vertebrates, even in common ‘species of low concern,’” warn the authors of a recent study on global biodiversity loss.
The leading conservationist organization World Wide Fund for Nature echoes that sentiment. “The world is dealing with an unprecedented spike in illegal wildlife trade, threatening to overturn decades of conservation gains,” WWF warns.
Ever since we picked up the first sticks and stones to use them as tools in our evolutionary cradle in Africa, we’ve been hunting animals. Yet, whereas we once did so largely for our sustenance, we are now doing so at an industrial scale for fun and profit. Trophy hunters and illegal wildlife poachers carry on killing endangered animals around the planet with wanton abandon. Meanwhile, climate change and habitat loss are pushing already beleaguered species ever closer to the brink of extinction in the wild.
“While war and terrorist atrocities make daily headlines, the horrors being waged on wildlife slide under the radar: 100 million sharks killed every year, mostly for their fins;… more than 1,000 rhinos poached every year from South Africa alone,” Jermey points out. “And there has been a huge decline in the size of wildlife populations since 1970. In human terms, that’s like losing the entire population of Asia from the world.”
