Great article of Bryan Christy on the National Geographic:
CITES Ivory Policy Is On Drugs
“…Here is where it’s useful to jump from my grade school memories to a metaphor my team used while investigating the story that became Blood Ivory: Ivory Worship. Cocaine.
Every time one of us wanted to say the word elephant or ivory, we substituted the word cocaine. When we did this, we found that the emotion and melodrama that attaches so easily to animals and often intrudes on good clean criminal investigation disappeared. (Drugs are also on the mind of the CITES Secretary General who earlier this month said that wildlife crime fighters need to start approaching criminals as if they were narcotics traffickers.)….”
Photo: mother and calf in Samburu, Kenya.
