The elephant in the room was clearly visible a few days ago as the second-in-line to the British throne, Prince William, beamed a stark warning across the globe from a Time For Change event in London.
An elephant is being killed every 15 minutes. The African population of these magnificent beasts has declined by a third since 2007. Before long there will be no more left in the wild.
The Duke of Cambridge on the fight against #IllegalWildlifeTrade #Tusk4Change @tusk_org event. pic.twitter.com/Q3LmP7ggmJ
— Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) September 22, 2016
As a way of alerting the world to the impending catastrophe, Prince William cannot be faulted. But like so many before him, he concentrated on Africa, on the poachers. Yet the only effective long-term answer to the loss of endangered species is to cut off demand, and that is not in Africa, but in Asia: in China, Vietnam and Thailand.
Tragically, much of this demand comes from those who pathetically believe that elephant ivory, or rhino horn, or tiger eyeballs constitute some sort of mystical, magical miracle cure for a bewildering range of medical conditions.
Tiger blood is supposed to build willpower. Tiger bones apparently have an anti-inflammatory effect and so help tackle everything from headaches to arthritis. Tiger eyeballs are said to ease epilepsy, malaria and cataracts. Tiger penis, unsurprisingly, is viewed as an aphrodisiac. Even tiger faecal matter has a value in this bizarre belief system: it helps treat alcoholism. I suppose being treated with tiger poo may well sober you up, so perhaps this one works.
Huge fall in African elephant population as poaching crisis continues via @WWF https://t.co/SVuika2etJ pic.twitter.com/108YJtjZ7F
— Elephants Count (@ElephantsCount) September 26, 2016
Sadly, there seems to be no available endangered species body part to treat a suspension of intellectual faculties or an onset of gullibility.
This is not to dismiss the value of eastern medicine. There is no doubt that Chinese herbalists can concoct mixtures that do actually work. And I myself have benefited from Tibetan medicine. By taking my pulse in a different way from the western practice, a Tibetan doctor was able to tell me within 30 seconds that I had a minor liver problem, something it had taken the British health service exhaustive tests and many weeks to work out.
But I have seen no evidence that any of these animal parts have any medical value whatsoever. Rather, their use seems to be based on a simplistic belief that by consuming an animal, a human is able somehow, by some sort of osmosis, to absorb specific qualities from that creature.
The Chinese government has belatedly begun to act to curb demand for products from endangered species. Their removal from the Chinese pharmacopeia in 1993 has doused demand. And a new law from 2014 introduces jail sentences for those who eat or purchase products from such animals. In many ways, China has done more than any other Asian country to tackle this problem.
But the fact is that China remains the world’s largest consumer of illegal wildlife products, not helped by the conflicting signals sent by the government in Beijing. It is still selling its “legal” stock of ivory at a rate of 5.5 tons a year, which keeps the ivory traders going, provides cover for illegal ivory, and transmits an ambiguous message to the population at large.
And nothwithstanding its action in the 1993 to discourage the use of endangered species in medicine, in 2006 the Chinese state granted a patent for pure ivory pills to treat bone tuberculosis.
Moreover, the fact that it does not have a law against animal cruelty suggests that the value it places on animal life and animal suffering is minimal, so it is hardly surprising that the population at large displays the same response.
Ele pops in Africa have declined by around 111K over past 10 yrs according to latest African Elephant Status Report. https://t.co/LUvnY2jqVM pic.twitter.com/jqFf3FVfI3
— Elephants Count (@ElephantsCount) September 25, 2016
Yet other countries are doing even less. In 2008, a rumour spread through Vietnam that rhino horn had cured a politician’s cancer, and that single incident can largely explain the massive increase in rhino poaching in Africa since then, as increasingly rich Vietnamese try to compensate for the absence of proper cancer treatment facilities by defaulting to rhino horn.
And now it has turned into a status symbol, too – a virility enhancer, the alcoholic drink of millionaires, more expensive than cocaine, even than gold. And for what? The same sort of stuff you might find in human fingernails.
Yet there is hope. In the 1970s, Japan used to be the biggest consumer of rhino horn in Asia. Then, in 1980, the Japanese government ratified the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and told all manufacturers of rhino horn medicine to find alternative ingredients for their products. The move was almost completely successful in eliminating the trade in rhino horn. Nor, by the way, was there an explosion amongst the population in the conditions rhino horn had been treating.
Yet time is running out for the rhino, for the tiger, for the elephant. It is welcome that Prince William has taken up the cause, but ultimately the survival of Africa’s wonderful creatures lies not in London, not even in Africa, but in Asia.
