In the dazzling antique market, we usually see a milky white non-gold non-jade carving, it is rounded throughout, the tentacles are cold, people just look at it and love it, and the price is high, attracting countless people to chase.
Against the backdrop of human greed and vanity, a bloody slaughter is added to the back of this object. It's ivory. There are many Buddhist believers in the world, and in order to meet the needs of customers, many ivory are carved into the kind appearance of the Buddha, but the Buddha is compassionate in nature and does not kill, which is ironic.
A wide variety of ivory products
But for some people, life is just a game, and animals are just inferior creatures that do not need respect or love at all. As long as it is profitable everything does not need to be considered.
Now, many elephants are killed for the greed of thieves and take away their tusks, regardless of age, as long as they grow tusks, they will not escape the clutches of the devil. Why are these thieves so disorganized, isn't it enough to take only the ivory of an old and dead elephant?
Characteristics of elephants
In order to solve this problem, we first need to understand the population characteristics of elephants, which is also an important factor in the difficulty of retrieving the tusks of old elephants. The ancestors of elephants were mammoths, and yes, the mighty and mighty ferocious animals with a handful of hairs on their heads during the Ice Age.
Mammoth
They belong to the mammalian order Proboscis and have only three species, namely common African elephants, Asian elephants, and African forest elephants. Elephants are social animals, usually in groups of one family, and sometimes several families come together to form an imposing herd of elephants.
Asian elephants weigh about 4 tons, and African elephants weigh one or two tons more. Their ears are as large as a fan, their legs are strong as columns, their skin is thick like a wall, and their upper jaws grow a pair of well-developed incisors and grow throughout their lives. This is the famous ivory. The main role of elephant teeth is to serve as competition between mates and for the search for and acquisition of food.
ivory
In the BBC documentary "Seven Worlds, One Planet", the elephant will use its tusks to obtain the mineral nutrients it needs under the mud of the swamp in the spring, while the baby elephant learns to wait for its mother to hand food to it.
Because they are a herd activity, an elephant will go to the elephant mound alone after death to wait for death to come, but the elephant mound is usually guarded by a strong elephant herd, and legend has it that tens of thousands of tusks are piled up there.
A herd of elephants
Humans who want to look for it will inevitably be attacked by elephants, and the jungle is full of dangers, coveting not only dead elephants, but also bald eagles, cheetahs and terrible animals in the forest.
The theft of ivory
Humans rarely steal elephant meat, and the purpose of hunting elephants is to obtain ivory. Elephants are born for a long time, after 4 to 5 years of gestation and breastfeeding, until they start to grow ivory at the age of two, and the pair of teeth will accompany them until they die.
According to research, the ivory quality of aging elephants is loose, has no luster, and is like the teeth of human aging, so it is difficult to sell high prices in the market. The ivory quality of young elephants is delicate, the tentacles are warm like Chinese jade, and there are small natural patterns on it suitable for carving.
elephant
In addition to this reason, the demand for elephants by humans has risen sharply. Ivory was not originally a valuable object, and even hundreds of years ago this item only appeared in the Western Regions.
This also has to be "attributed" to the merchants who are good at raising prices, and as more and more people learn about this product, it is also loved by many people. So prices and demand are rising, and old elephants can no longer meet market demand, and this sharp blade is immediately aimed at all elephants with ivory.
Ivory products
Scarce is expensive, we mentioned above that the growth cycle of elephants is very long, and now the number of elephants is gradually decreasing, ivory is also in short supply, and the natural price has risen, which has led some people to hunt elephants regardless of human morality.
The current state of elephants
Many people are also wondering if elephants can survive without their tusks. In fact, if only the exposed ivory elephants were targeted, they would not die at all. Elephants' tusks are divided into two parts, one part is the blood pressure hidden in the skull, which contains many neurovascular vessels, accounting for one-third of the total length of the ivory. The remaining two-thirds are blood vessel-free and, like human teeth, are just higher carbon-containing substances.
Elephant body structure diagram
Taking only two-thirds of them would not have a big impact on the survival of the elephants, but it would cause great inconvenience when mating and finding food and fighting for territory. The price of blood teeth is several times higher than that of ordinary teeth, and the price of ordinary ivory is 2400 US dollars internationally.
In order to obtain higher profits, some greedy humans directly choose to kill the elephant and take out a whole tusk. And selfish humans in order to prevent elephants from suddenly waking up in an anesthetic to attack them while stealing ivory, ordinary thieves will directly kill the elephants. This is one of the reasons for the sharp decline in elephant numbers.
Elephant nose
According to the survey, the current decline in the number of Asian elephants is mainly due to human domestication and circus performances, and the reason for the sharp decline in the number of African elephants is the ivory trade in addition to the sharp reduction of forests caused by human activities, which has reduced the habitat of elephants and the environment has deteriorated.
The number of elephants in the world plummeted from the 1990s to the twentieth century, from the first few hundred thousand to tens of thousands today, and the number of new births has always been lower than the number of hunts. The number of Asian elephants in China is only more than 300, which is a shocking number.
African elephant vs Asian elephant
Perhaps because the population has fallen too rapidly, elephants have reduced the length of their teeth by one-fifth to protect their newborns, and once only 3% of elephants had no teeth, and now only 2% to 3% of elephants have teeth.
summary
A 2017 documentary, The Ivory Game, was unveiled that exposed a dark ivory trade between Asia and Africa. Between 2012 and 2015, 150,000 elephants died in slaughter, and elephants in central Africa were nearly wiped out.
The Ivory Game
The documentary brings together only a few young people who love life, who come from all over the world, just for one belief – to protect the elephant herd. It's a war of gunfire, and the hunters are cruel by nature, and the shotguns in their hands will not be merciful. And what do these young people have? A pure heart of love and kindness. They say that elephants are all they have.
The ivory trade is prohibited
On December 31, 2017, China imposed a total restriction on the ivory trade. Elephants are soft by nature, they are a spiritual animal, and they are very friendly with humans, and there are people in this world who are constantly hunting them, and there are people who are willing to sacrifice themselves to protect this group of docile little animals.
Resisting ivory and protecting elephant herds is not just a slogan, it requires each of us to restrain ourselves in order to strangle this cruel trade in the cradle.