The Global Plan To save Elephants

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The Global Plan to Save Elephants

2 Introduction

Renown strategy expert, Michael Porter of The Harvard Business School, said a business plan is not planned but crafted. In other words, it evolves as strengths or opportunities are capitalized upon and threats or weaknesses are overcome, not unlike the plasticity of this plan.

Indeed, our plan will change often as we fight the war, battle after battle, against traffickers, poachers and antiquated cultural dogma. Therefore, through the media, in the courts and on the ground, the flexibility of our strategies and tactics maximizes our plan’s viability. And so, while ever improving as the war wages, these are the plan’s seven basic tenets.

As we embrace these tenets, we must be ever conscious of the urgency to implement them. For, poachers have killed 100,000 African elephants from 2010 to 2012, according to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, with one in 12 elephants killed in 2011. The elephant population in Tanzania’s world famous Selous Reserve has plummeted by 67 per cent in just four years. And, there were 1.2 million African elephants in 1980 but only 420,000 in 2012—a staggering loss of 780,000 elephants.

This is why we must implement our plan expeditiously for the extinction of African elephants draws eminently near as illustrated by this equation: {420,000 African elephants remaining} ÷ {30,000 killed each year} = 14 years Mindful of the fact that elephants, as a species, have survived for many thousand of years, fourteen years is precious little time. So, we invite you to read our plan with a sense of urgency.

(Please note that Executive Briefing: African Elephants, which is free and available on our website, is perquisite to fully appreciating the strategies and tactics of this plan.)

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I The Global Plan to Save Elephants (GPSE) will influence governments to immediately destroy all stockpiles of elephant tusks.

This is critically important since portions of stockpiles inevitably make their way to the market through theft or the holder’s decision to raise money from “approved” sales. For example, since the two legal sales of ivory in 1997 and 2008, which were both approved by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), there has been a significant increase in elephant poaching to fuel ivory trade.

CITES’s 1997 approval to sell elephant tusks was meant to undermine the market by lowering the price, thereby, reducing profits and creating a disincentive for trafficking. But it had the reverse effect. Traffickers in Southeast Asia, perhaps purposefully, misconstrued this as an implicit invitation to buy and sell. Yet, what causes incredulous dismay among conservationists is that, after this plan proved to be resounding failure in 1997, CITES implemented it again in 20008.

“CITES is sticking band-aids on with one hand and fueling poaching with the other. Its failure to combat the fundamental driver of the killing amounts to gross international negligence,” says Dr. Rosalind Reeve of David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

The director of Robin des Bois, Charlotte Nithart, adds: “Any further discussion of legalizing ivory trade is a recipe for extinction . . . Just as the legal trade in cigarettes, medicines, and weapons has not stopped them being smuggled, the legal trade in ivory has not stopped the slaughter of elephants and smuggling of their ivory.”

“Any discussions on legalizing trade in wildlife products be it ivory, rhino horns, or tiger parts is stimulating demand,” explains Mary Rice, Executive Director of EIA. "Such rhetoric must cease immediately if we are to reverse the trend toward extinction of these and other species.”

"CITES has a tendency to be swayed by proposals suggesting that large species such as elephants can be exploited sustainably and the profits set aside to provide funds for future conservation when there is no evidence that these have ever worked other than superficially in the short term," said Andrew Dobson, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. "In contrast, there is evidence that shows how rapidly these schemes lead to loss of the resource species and only short-term profitability to the few individuals who ran the scheme."

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The Global Plan to Save Elephants

Implementation: We will use political influence, legal influence and other law abiding means to urge governments to destroy all stockpiles of elephant tusks.

This will be achieved by volunteers 1. writing articles, 2. engaging in email campaigns, 3. social media campaigns and 4. peaceful demonstrations.

It is essential that all demonstrations we organize, or in which we participate, be thoroughly peaceful, conducted according to law and coordinated with local law enforcement officials and officers. We must always be respectful, fully cooperative and courteous to them. And, of course, it is mandatory that participants behave as ladies and gentlemen at all times.

II GPSE will provide assistance to Botswana.

The Republic of Botswana is a landlocked nation located in central, southern Africa with a population of over two million people. The country and government are stable. This is fortunate, indeed, since Botswana is critical to the survival of African elephants for two reasons: First, there are more elephants in Botswana than any other country; and so, it is the crown jewel of the elephant kingdom.

Our concern is that after the genocide in Tanzania and other elephant range countries, traffickers and poachers may set their sites on this safe haven. Thus, because Botswana is the center of the elephant universe, so to speak, it is obvious that it must be guarded vigilantly—an issue we will address later in this section.

The number of Botswana elephants varies greatly and so we await a systemic counting process which is presently underway. Yet, it appears there are somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 elephants in Botswana; and, they are reproducing at approximately 5% each year. Adding to this growth are herds of elephants which became refuges, fleeing the heavily poached countries bordering Botswana. And, making Botswana more attractive to fleeing herds, in 2015 the government wisely banned commercial trophy hunting on state land. So, ironically, there is the potential of overpopulation.

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Yet, the outdated method of culling must never be used to control these or other elephant populations. Jon Herskovitz discusses a much more intelligent approach. “Kwa Zulu-Natal province, in the southeast, is looking to expand a project running for more than a decade where elephants populations have been controlled by injecting cows with a vaccine that triggers an immune system response to block sperm reception. Testing of the vaccine, administered by dart and requiring an annual booster, has been conducted at 14 small reserves. Studies have shown it is reversible, nearly 100 percent effective and has no adverse impact on elephant health or behavior.” 1 This method will allow zero population growth in which natural deaths equals births; and so, the population will be stabilized which, in turn, will make food supply, range territories and protection more manageable.

We must also consider that, besides hosting the largest elephant population, Botswana has the highest ratio of elephants per humans. Should the population of elephants equal 150,000, then there is about 1 elephant for every 14 people. This places a burden upon the citizenry, both from taxation and land sharing. It also burdens the flora as elephants forage for food.

The second reason Botswana is critical to the survival of African elephants is the fact that the president, Lieutenant General Seretse Khama Ian Khama, and the government is trustworthy.

Such trustworthiness is the reason Berlin based Transparency International listed the Republic of Botswana 30 out of 177 countries, ranked upon public sector integrity in 2013. Not surprisingly, Botswana was first on Transparency International’s list of all African countries.

By contrast, several other African leaders cannot be trusted, precluding our ability to help elephant herds as much as we would like in such nations. For, untrustworthiness of an African nation’s leader and government is the singular, overarching problem of protecting elephants.

It is also encouraging that President Ian Khama is a wildlife conservationist.

Speaking at an international meeting on elephant conservation in Botswana’s capital in December 2014, he declared that his government had deployed “all our

1 Jon Herskovitz, “Elephant birth control: South Africa plans campaign to avoid population explosion,” Huffington Post, August 15, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/15/elephant-birth-control_n_1778127.html

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The Global Plan to Save Elephants

security forces” to guard against poachers. 2 His words were echoed by Commander, Lieutenant General Gaolathe Galebotswe who was quoted by The Botswana Daily News on April 16, 2015 as saying “the army will continuously protect the wildlife population, which currently exists because of the commitment by the past and current leadership.”

Botswana is a stunning example and catalyst for all of Africa. Rudi van Aarde, of the University of Pretoria who studies regional elephant populations, stated it succinctly: “Peace and conservation success go hand in hand. Warfare and unrest and improper governance go hand in hand with conservation failures.” 3 Based on this observation, as well as the other comments we have considered, Botswana is clearly on the right track.

At the same time, Botswana is about the size of France so to secure its borders from poachers would be a somewhat monumental task requiring troops bivouacking in the field and personnel supporting them from secure bases located around the country. These bases would need materiel, food, a medical staff and medical supplies from regional support bases receiving orders from a central command base. Moreover, poachers are likened to a guerilla force that is elusive and stealthy by nature, an ideal force to penetrate a huge border like Botswana and inflict lightening quick fatalities.

All in all, this would be a daunting challenge for any military. Of course, President Ian Khama was Commander of the Botswana Defense Force before becoming the nation’s leader so he is eminently qualified militarily and he most assuredly understands the challenge of protecting Botswana’s elephants.

Therefore, GPSE approaches the sovereign nation of Botswana as servants to his excellency, the president, in hopes that we might, if needed, augment his campaign to defend elephants.

Implementation: With the permission and under the auspices of the Botswana government, GPSE will assist with or carry out:

2 “Botswana, a rare refuge for elephants,” Associated Press, February 1, 2015, http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/life/entertainment/story/2015/feb/01/botswana-rare-refuge-elephants/2 63531/ 3

“Botswana, a rare refuge for elephants,” Associated Press

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Range Management Programs such as: 1. reforestation ensuring that plenty of nourishing food for vast herds will be available for future generations, 2. providing reversible vaccines, as described above, that temporarily prevent births for population management.

Elephant Defense Program assistance for specific, approved programs through: 1. fund raising, 2. grant writing and, possibly, 3. lobbying.

III The purchase of land bordering elephant ranges.

This is needed since the human population of Sub-Saharan Africa will more than double over the next thirty-five years to 2.4 billion people.

And, “Africa's population explosion has the potential to zoom past currentestimates”, said Carl Haub, a senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based non-profit group.

“Sub-Saharan Africa has, without a doubt, the greatest population growth potential of any region,” said Haub. “The projection today is that it will increase by about two and a half times. But the important thing to remember is that even that projection assumes that the birth ate in sub-Saharan Africa will decrease. And in many of those countries today, it [has] not.” Consequently, the population could exceed their projection of 2.4 billion by 2050.

Furthermore, 30% of its population suffers from malnutrition. Clean water became less available to 63 million people or 24% of the population from 1990 to 2011. And, 37% of the population is illiterate, which implies that the reading 63% may not posses the higher cognitive skills to adequately address the approaching misery.

Therefore, we must ask what priority, if any, these masses will give to

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The Global Plan to Save Elephants

elephants and the ranges they inhabit. This is why it is imperative to purchase land bordering elephant ranges. Such land might be placed in a trust, perhaps an irrevocable trust, for posterity.

Implementation: This is achieved through the cooperation of local real estate professionals who are motivated by commissions to find land on the market that borders elephant ranges. As a firm policy, after performing a “due diligence,” all land must be thoroughly inspected first-hand on the ground and “walked” by a GPSE representative before a transaction can be approved.

IV Investigations.

We will lead a cost efficient, comprehensive and productive investigation.

For security reasons we are unable to discuss our investigation further.

Implementation: Confidential.

V The encouragement and organization of law abiding, peaceful demonstrations among Buddhists in Southeast Asia, particularly China.

The weakness of awareness campaigns, it seems, is that they are often conducted from countries outside Southeast Asia. This presents linguistic, logistic and cultural challenges, which are difficult to overcome. And, of course, such remotely managed campaigns are extremely expensive.

This is why we want Southeast Asians, especially the Chinese, to lead and manage the GPSE Southeast Asian Campaign rather than attempting to do so from afar. In addition to eliminating linguistics, logistic and cultural challenges, this method will also eliminate self-reliant criteria, relying upon one’s own opinion; in this case, one that is extra-oriental.

Fortunately, there is an organized sect which is closely attuned to the Asian culture, some of whom we expect to champion our cause: the Buddhist. For, Buddhism implores respect for all living things. “Buddha first taught himself to

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avoid the sin of killing any living creature . . . ” And, “I will try to be kind and gentle to every living thing and protect all who are weaker than myself.”

There are, roughly speaking, about 500 million Buddhist worldwide. And, approximately 18 percent of the Chinese population claim Buddhism as their faith, or around 240 million people. Should only a tiny fraction of the people represented by these vast numbers join our demonstrations, we might, over time, realize a shift toward societal intolerance of ivory.

As mentioned earlier in this plan, it is paramount that all demonstrations we organize, or in which we participate, be thoroughly peaceful, conducted according to law and coordinated with local law enforcement officials and officers. We must always be respectful, fully cooperative and courteous to them. Indeed, it is mandatory that participants behave as ladies and gentlemen at all times.

Implementation: Most of the preparations for our peaceful demonstrations will be conducted by local volunteers. Yet, GPSE may help with 1. promotion, 2. printed material such as maps, signs and banners, 3. translated correspondence to participants and local officials and 4. instructions.

Thank you for helping to save the elephants!