Elephant Families Stranded

We need your help with one of our most challenging animal rescues ever.

We have to relocate three elephant families immediately. The 12 elephants are stranded in small patches of forest in Côte d’Ivoire, Africa.

These elephants are in immense danger of being killed due to clashes over crops with surrounding townspeople. Some have already been seen with bullet holes in their ears. They are also threatened by poachers, who are relentlessly hunting them for their ivory tusks. Babies and parents live every day at risk of being killed.

With your help, our elephant transport experts will move them family by family 250 miles south to Azagny National Park. There they will have 55,000 acres of forest and rivers to live in safety and freedom.

You have been generous in helping animals, and I thank you for that support. Now I am asking you to show how much you care about animals by helping with this urgent matter. You can help give 12 elephants a safe new home. These elephants are running out of time, and they need you now.

We have successfully relocated elephants in Africa and India. But as the video shows, this move is more difficult, as these are forest elephants. They are shy and reclusive and live in deep thickets where there are only dirt tracks leading in and out.

With your gift, you will help cover the expert veterinary care needed to ensure the health and safety of the elephants while they are captured and moved to their new home. You also will help prepare the special vehicles needed to move the elephants (some of them weigh over two tons).

You can help with this historic elephant move.

Thank you for all you do to protect elephants and other animals.

Céline Sissler-Bienvenu
IFAW Regional Director, France and Francophone Africa

Orphaned Baby Elephants

This is a story of tragedy that’s turned into a tale of hope. It’s the story Suni and 12 other orphans need you.

Most of the 13 baby elephants’ mothers were killed by poachers, and now they require round-the-clock care.

That’s why IFAW has entered an exciting new partnership, the Zambia Elephant Orphanage. I’ve committed $100,000 this first year to help protect and raise the orphaned baby elephants. I’m hoping you’ll play a part by helping today.

Like me, you feel a special connection to animals. We both know that elephants face many threats, and orphaned baby elephants need special care to survive. Will you please help by making a holiday gift for elephants today?

Suni was found dragging herself along a road, her right back leg paralyzed by a horrific axe attack by an unknown assailant. She was rescued and brought to the Orphanage.

The round-the-clock care given by the Orphanage’s Keepers and veterinarians has helped Suni regain some use of her leg, but she still is not able to walk normally. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that the constant veterinary care she’s receiving at the Orphanage will result in a full recovery.

The Orphanage was started by Game Rangers International to give orphaned baby elephants a safe home to grow up in. Working in close partnership with the Zambia Wildlife Authority and The David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation, IFAW is supporting the Orphanage’s efforts.

After a period of months or even years, the elephants will be moved to the protected Kafue National Park, where they will hang out with other elephants and continue their rehabilitation. Eventually the grown-up orphans will say goodbye to their keepers and become part of an existing wild family.

We’re protecting the baby elephants and providing them with nourishing food and medical care, as well as a nurturing, mothering presence. It’s a team effort and we need you on the team.

We’re working in many ways to fight the heartless poachers, but while that struggle continues we need to care for orphaned baby elephants, like Suni. Won’t you please help Suni and other animals in need today?

Thanks, and happy holidays.

Jason Bell
IFAW Program Director, Elephants

Elephants, Ivory & NBC

Elephants, Ivory & NBC

As if big game hunting wasn’t disgusting enough on its own, it’s horror is compounded when a national sports channel broadcasts the entire thing, and when the animal being hunted is under constant threat from cruel and relentless poachers. Tell NBC Sports that you won’t stand for “Under Wild Skies” continuing to be on the air.

In a recent episode of this show, the host and his guide stalk and shoot a bull elephant, who trumpets and writhes in pain, even charging after the two men. The host then shoots it again between the eyes. After the elephant falls, the two men stand next to the dead elephant to gloat about their “achievement.” Upon returning to their camp, they discuss how “special” it is to bring back an elephant’s ivory.

This show demonstrates an absolutely horrific lack of respect for wild animals in their own habitat, a lack of any kind of empathy for the suffering of these animals, and a complete ignorance of the problems facing these animals every day.

Please join the thousands of people who are voicing their outrage at this episode and this show. Tell NBC Sports to remove the show from their programming immediately!

Thank you for taking action,

Emily L.
Care2 and ThePetitionSite Team

Drink The Elephant’s Child

The Elephant’s Child

What mammal often lives to be 70 years old and can feed itself, spray water, and lift heavy objects with its long, flexible trunk? The elephant of course! As you might guess, elephants have a strong sense of smell. They can smell water – or a smoothie – long before they see it. If you practice, you, too, may soon be able to smell The Elephant’s Child from afar, but that means drinking smoothies on a daily basis, using proper “smoothie etiquette” at all times.

Yield: 3 cups

2 cups soy milk
2 tablespoons peanut butter
2 tablespoons of your favorite jelly
1 ripe banana
2 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons oat bran

Place all the ingredients in a blender, and mix on medium speed for 30 seconds.

Pour into tall glasses, smell the aroma and serve.

Excerpt from Great American Smoothies: The Ultimate Blending Guide for Shakes, Slushes, Desserts, & Thirst Quenchers by Gabriel Constans

Elephant Families In Mourning

Dear Gabriel,

I’ve just learned that 86 elephants — 33 of them pregnant females — have been gunned down by poachers in the Central African country of Chad.

The image above is from a similar slaughter last year. The ivory tusks have been hacked out and stolen. The ivory will be sold on the black market, and then eventually carved into products nobody needs.

Entire elephant families – even the pregnant mothers – brutally killed…to make ivory trinkets?

It’s heartbreaking and senseless…and it HAS TO STOP.

You can help protect elephants and all animals by making an emergency anti-cruelty donation today.

I know you believe as I do – that an elephant’s life is worth more than a silly trinket.

Elephants are incredibly social – they gather in extended families, the moms and aunts and cousins all live together. And they’re so much like us in other ways. They’re known to play and cry and even mourn their own dead.

They don’t deserve to die for the sake of an ivory ornament. Please help us stop this cruelty today.

The poaching of elephants for ivory is a global problem. And with offices, partner organizations, and supporters in so many countries, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) is working around the world to save elephants.

Here’s how you can help too:

IFAW has trained hundreds of rangers and more than 1,600 wildlife law enforcement officials around the world to protect elephants and all animals. You can provide the rangers with anti-poaching training as well as essential equipment like radios, backpacks, boots and uniforms.

Significant quantities of smuggled ivory tusks have been intercepted by borders and customs officials trained by IFAW. The ivory trade is a chain of cruelty leading from a dead elephant all the way to a shelf in a gift shop. You can help us stop ivory smugglers and break that chain of cruelty.

China is the eventual destination for much of the poached ivory. Many consumers don’t realize that the vast majority of ivory products come from murdered elephants. You can help educate consumers in China and other countries and help shut down the markets for ivory.

The cruel ivory trade threatens to wipe out many populations of elephants – and this massacre of pregnant mothers shows that poachers will stop at nothing to get their hands on ivory.

Although today is a terribly sad day for elephants, I hope you’ll join me in using this day’s tragic news as motivation to fight even harder to protect elephants.

We CAN win this fight. But we need you.

Please make an emergency anti-cruelty donation today to help IFAW protect elephants and all animals.

Thanks for your help,

Jason Bell
IFAW Programme Director, Elephants

P.S. Some regions of Africa face total annihilation of their elephants. If we don’t stop the poachers, who will? Please make an emergency anti-cruelty donation today.

Solutions To Stop Slaughter

Dear Gabriel,

Elephants are incredibly intelligent, family-oriented animals, who have been known to mourn the deaths of their loved ones and demonstrate compassion toward strangers. But thanks to increased ivory demand in China and elsewhere, they’re being slaughtered by the hundreds.

In January, hundreds of pieces of elephant ivory were seized at Kenya’s main port. And those are just the smugglers who got caught. Who knows how many elephants have been murdered for their tusks in the last few years alone?

The rise in poaching is not only an environmental or animal welfare issue; it’s also an economic one. Diminishing numbers of elephants in Kenya means a loss of revenue from tourists who travel to the country to see the elephants.

This week at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), Kenya asked a wider group of countries to pledge not to sell ivory stockpiles, which is a great sign of commitment. But they must also take steps to address the elephant slaughter before it happens. Ask the Kenyan government to draft new legislation to combat poaching in their country — before the elephants are gone forever.

Thank you for taking action,

Kathleen
Care2 and ThePetitionSite Team

Mammal Friends Murdered

About the Ivory
From Bloody Ivory.org

In 1979 there were an estimated 1.3 million African elephants. A decade later, widespread poaching had reduced that figure by half. Just 600,000 African elephants remained.

Africa’s savannahs and forests were no longer sanctuaries for elephants; they had been turned into graveyards.

In 1989, a worldwide ban on ivory trade was approved by CITES. Levels of poaching fell dramatically, and black market prices of ivory slumped.

CITES had saved the African elephant. Or had it?

Since 1997, there have been sustained attempts by certain countries to overturn the ban. In 1999, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe were allowed an ‘experimental one-off sale’ of over 49,000kg of ivory to Japan. Then in 2002, a further one off-sale was approved, which finally took place in 2008 – and resulted in 105,000kg of ivory being shipped to China and Japan.

Today, levels of poaching and illegal trade are spiralling out of control once again. In many areas, rates of poaching are now the worst they have been since 1989. In 2009, over 20,000kg of ivory was seized by police and customs authorities worldwide and in 2011, just thirteen of the largest seizures amounted to over 23,000kg. Countries continue to report localised extinctions of small vulnerable elephant populations and a number of range States (countries which have elephants) are edging closer to losing all their remaining elephants.

March 2010

Despite this, at CITES’ Fifteenth Conference of the Parties in March 2010, Tanzania and Zambia tried to reduce the level of protection their elephants are afforded and also sought approval for a one-off sale of over 110,000kg of ivory to China and Japan. Although their Proposals were in direct contravention of the spirit a nine-year moratorium on ivory trade, agreed by all range States in 2007, the final wording of that moratorium unfortunately had a loophole which Tanzania and Zambia tried to exploit.

Many feared that if approved, the ivory sale would again increase demand for ivory in the Far East and endanger the future survival of many of Africa’s more fragile elephant populations that simply could not withstand any more poaching pressure.

Due to the hard work of many, including the African Elephant Coalition (formed of 23 African elephant range States), CITES rejected both Tanzania’s and Zambia’s Proposals.

March 2013

Once again, at CITES’ Sixteenth Conference of the Parties in March next year, Tanzania is seeking approval to sell ivory – over 101,000kg of it. This despite losing almost a quarter of it’s elephant population between 2006 and 2009 and authorities seizing 19,800kg of ivory originating in or exported from Tanzania between 2009 and 2011. Once again elephants need your help.

Bloody Ivory.org is intended to be a central portal of information about ivory trade, elephant poaching and the impact of CITES on Africa’s elephants. It provides you with a voice to join in the battle to protect elephants, who still need your support to stop the trade in their ivory.

Say NO to the ivory trade and spread the word!

Rahula, Savarna & Bodhi

Excerpt from the novel Buddha’s Wife.

Historically, Rahula was Yasodhara and Siddhartha’s son. Siddhartha was later known as “The Buddha” or “The Tathagata”.

Chapter Thirteen

“Run! Run!” shouted Rahula, as he picked Bodhi up under his arms and headed towards an impression in the hill. Savarna was close behind. He turned and yelled at Savarna again. “Hurry; they’re getting closer!”

She hitched up her sari and ran alongside her husband and son. The sound was like thunder. Their feet slid and bounced on the ground as it heaved. They plastered themselves against the shallow crevice just as the stampeding elephants ran by, their eyes wild with fright.

They had avoided bandits by following Rampal and Moksa’s advice. They had traveled in numbers and kept to the center of the plains. Now, just as they were about to traverse their last major obstacle, the Aravalli Mountains, some idiot had tried to catch a baby elephant. His attempt had angered the herd. People scattered to safety, but Rahula and his family had found themselves caught in the gigantic mammals’ path with nowhere to turn.

As the last tusked male lumbered by, blowing his trunk, Bodhi coughed violently from the wave of dust. It was so thick they could barely see one another.

“Bodhi.” Savarna covered his mouth and eyes with her sleeve, hoping that would alleviate the irritation. His coughing continued and they tried to comfort him, to no avail. His cough had worsened over the last several days and this was not helping. It was deepening and dangerously persistent.

“What happened?” Rahula exclaimed, after the last elephant had passed.

“We’re lucky,” Savarna reasoned, as her breath returned. “I didn’t think we would make it, did you?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Rahula panted, gasping for air.

They all rubbed their eyes, blinking to wash away the dust and dirt.

“We’ve got to find him a doctor,” Savarna insisted. “It’s getting worse.”

“Yes, I know,” Rahula agreed. “Let’s go back to Kanpur.”

“That’s a two-day journey,” Savarna exclaimed. “We can’t wait that long.”

“I doubt if there’s an herbalist int he village we passed this morning,” Rahula reasoned, “but we can try.”

Carrying his coughing son on his back, Rahula and Savarna backtracked and asked everyone they met if they knew of a healer in the vicinity. Late in the afternoon they came upon a woman washing clothes at the river. Her children were close by. They expected her to reply like all the others, that there was no help in the area.

“Yes,” she said, as she rung out a shirt on the rocks and yelled at one of her kids to stay away from the river’s edge. “Let me finish and I’ll take you to her.”

Rahula and Savarna shared a hopeful glance.

“Here,” Savarna said, “let me help.” She got down on her hands and knees, took a wet sari out of the basket and pushed, twisted and shook it in the wind, then folded it neatly and placed it on top of the other clean clothes in the adjoining basket. The women smiled and quickly completed their task.

“I am Henna,” the woman said, as she picked up her basket and called to her children. “Come. I will take you to my mother.” She looked at Bodhi, who was clinging to his father’s back and coughing. “She can cure anything.” They followed Henna towards the small village.

“Your mother?” Rahula asked.

“Yes,” Henna replied, “my mother.”

“I am Rahula and this is Savarna,” Rahula said. “This bag of rice on my back is our son Bodhi.”

Heena stopped short, as one of her youngest bumped into the back of her legs. “Did you say ‘Bodhi,’ like the tree?”

“Yes,” replied Rahula, “like the tree, strong and wise.”

“The Bodhi tree is the same one under which our Lord Buddha of Gotama awoke to his true nature,” Henna said.

“Yes,” Rahula said sharply, then saw the admonishing look from Savarna. “Yes, so we discovered.”

“Are you followers of the Tathagata?” Henna inquired, as she lifted the basket onto her head.

“No,” Savarna answered, before Rahula said something to offend their guide. “But we have hard of his great deeds and compassionate heart.” Rahula looked away as Savarna came alongside Henna. “Are you a follower of the Tathagata?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “We became disciples after hearing him speak. I was just a little girl, but my mother remembers him well.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Rahula wanted to find a remedy for Bodhi’s cough but hated the fact that it might come from a disciple of his father.

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