My organization, WildlifeDirect, recently became aware of the scale of laundering of illegal ivory in the ivory markets of Japan through its contact with the Japanese NGO Tears of the African Elephant. Please see more about the interview we did on NTV Wild via this link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvsj21F_FI4 (or watch the video embedded on top of this post). We...
World Elephant Day celebration in Samburu National Reserve with 91 children from Kenya’s poor neighbourhoods, slums and rural areas was probably the most moving experience of my life. The children experienced a real safari, in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. They camped for the first time in their lives, and they met wild wild animals in the...
Things have improved since the dark days of 2011 and 2012 when ivory poaching across Africa appeared to be spiralling out of control and conservations began to contemplate the unthinkable: the extinction of the African elephant. On World Elephant Day 2016 there are grounds for cautious optimism. #WorldElephantDay In 2016, the mean estimate of the Proportion...
By Paula Kahumbu In Kenya, when you hear that “Things are Elephant,” it means there’s a major problem. That’s why we chose this as the title for the first ever debate of its kind, organized by WildlifeDirect, on the future of elephants. On the afternoon of April 25, in a school hall in Nairobi, two...
By Paula Kahumbu World Elephant Day was celebrated around the world yesterday, with pageantry, song and dance, events and activities. Everyone was wearing grey. My day could hardly be described as “fun.” I sat for nearly nine hours with my team in a government waiting room at the office of the Chief of Police, in Nairobi to deliver a...
By Paula Kahumbu On November 14, less than a week after a solemn event in honor of African elephants in the sleepy town of Deep River, Connecticut, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will pulverize six tons of ivory in a very different kind of ceremony thousands of kilometers away in Denver, Colorado. The ivory...
By Paula Kahumbu On November 14, less than a week after a solemn event in honor of African elephants in the sleepy town of Deep River, Connecticut, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will pulverize six tons of ivory in a very different kind of ceremony thousands of kilometers away in Denver, Colorado. The ivory...
On Friday, April 19, I stood in Makadara Court in downtown Nairobi waiting to hear the case of a Vietnamese man arrested in transit at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on April 7 for smuggling 488 pieces of ivory. When I’d arrived, at 9:00 a.m., for the first of two ivory cases, scheduled for ten o’clock,...