Conservation
Just hearing the term “wildlife trade” brings to mind heart-wrenching photos of elephants who have been stripped of their tusks or pictures of rhinos without their horns. Actually, the definition of “wildlife trade” is more benign; it denotes any sale or exchange of wild animal and plant resources by people.
Nature & Wildlife
Anyone who has ever adopted a cat or dog into the family knows that each pet is distinctive. One of your dogs, for example, may have loved to spend all day at your side, while another may have enjoyed some daytime hours to chill out by herself on her favorite couch.
African Safaris
You probably already know the perilous position that the world’s elephants are currently negotiating. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has officially listed the Asian elephant as endangered and the African elephant as vulnerable.
Nature & Wildlife
When you weigh anywhere from 1,000 to 14,000 pounds, you tend to leave huge, deep footprints wherever you walk. But more than just evidence of your passing through, those footprints, it turns out, can be habitats for dozens of other beings. Much like beavers, elephants have widely been recognized as “ecosystem engineers.”
Nature & Wildlife
More than 1,500 “national” days have been declared, according to the National Day Calendar. For example, January 2 is National Cream Puff Day. March 4 is Marching Music Day. The first Saturday in May is National Start Seeing Monarchs Day. And don’t forget World Emoji Day on July 17.
News & More
Sometimes, it’s the small, quiet things that rightly should command our utmost attention. Such a situation occurred on March 1, 2018, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) wrote a memorandum stating that it was reversing a 2014 ban imposed by the Obama administration on elephant trophy imports.
News & More
We are losing animal species at an alarming, unprecedented rate, and our wild places are increasingly coming under attack.
Nature & Wildlife
The woolly mammoth—an animal that went extinct 4,000 years ago—is currently being considered for legal protection under conservation trade rules. “How that can be?” you might well ask. The answer lies in a story that’s entwined with some very modern-day issues: climate change and the rampant poaching of today’s elephants.
Conservation
A PERSONAL REFLECTION ON THE U.S. IVORY CRUSH Two years ago when I was on safari in Botswana, I saw my first herd of wild elephants. We heard them first—a low, rumbling thunder in the distance.
Conservation
On Monday, May 6, 2013, 17 heavily armed poachers entered Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in the Central African Republic. They then proceeded to a large clearing known as Dzanga Bai, or “village of elephants,” where between 50 and 200 of the animals congregate daily to drink in the mineral salts found in the sands.
