“Animals are those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind." John Stuart Mill In South Africa, the elephant has emerged at the center of heated political debates and culture wars, as the government and national park system maneuvers to return to the practice of “culling” -- a hideous euphemism for mass murder of elephant.  Culling advocates – including government officials, park service bureaucrats, ecologists, “conservationists,” the World Wildlife Fund, farmers, and villagers -- argue that elephants have had deleterious effects on habitat, biodiversity, and people, such that their herds need to be “managed” and reduced.  Their favored “solution” to the “elephant problem” is the final solution of mass slaughter. Opponents of culling include animal activists in South Africa and the world at large, ecologists, and thousands of Western tourists fond of elephants and desiring to see them alive and well in their natural habitat.  In addition to the moral argument that elephants have intrinsic value and the right to exist – quite independent of their utility for humans -- critics dismiss the claim that elephants threaten habitats and biodiversity.  They argue that no data exists to support the environmental damage allegedly wrought by elephants and that the so-called “conflict” between elephants and humans is greatly exaggerated.  They argue that ethically and scientifically correct policies are not being adopted because government and “conservationists” are allied with the gaming, hunting, and ivory industries, and that these forces are demonizing elephants as a problem or pest as a way to reopen the lucrative ivory trade.  Against calls for culling, they seek non-violent methods of controlling elephant populations, such as include contraceptives and creating corridors between parks to allow more even population distribution.   The burden of proof for justifying mass slaughter falls on the side of those advocating the extreme policy of culling.  This burden has not been met, but there is a rush to resume culling nonetheless.  Scratch the surface of the rush to kill and one finds the determining interests of the powerful hunting and ivory trade industries as well as a frightening ecofascist mindset that treats “surplus” or “problem” populations with a ruthless administrative and utilitarian logic shorn of moral sensibility and rooted in market mentalities and “might is right” ideologies. I see the human-elephant “conflict” as a microcosm of a planetary social and ecological crisis brought about by globalization, underdevelopment, insatiable resource extraction, and the violent and hierarchical domination of human over human and human over nature.  The approach of the South African government, park system, and people toward the “elephant problem” has global significance and is an indicator of whether or not humankind as a whole can steer itself away from imminent disaster and learn to harmonize its existence with the natural world.

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South Africa is known to the world not only for its magnificent wildlife and parks, but also for the trafficking in endangered species, the huge gaming and hunting industries, and the brutal killing of elephants for ivory and body parts.  Throughout the African continent, the park system and state operate within a global capitalist marketplace where the name of the game is profit and growth. 

One of the richest “resources” in South Africa’s possession is the wildlife that roams the plains.  Yet rather than respecting the intrinsic value and rights of animals, or even adopting the “enlightened anthropocentric” policy of “ecotourism” (see below), South Africa has chosen to auction wild animals such as elephants and lions to the highest bidder.  Like the lawless days of the Old West in the US, the South African government and conservation organizations operate in an anarchistic environment, flouting the national and international laws that – ever so feebly -- regulate the trafficking in animals and endangered species.  Governments, conservation organizations, tourist offices, the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, and all provinces enable and support the gaming, hunting, and ivory industries that kill tens of thousands of animals each year for “sport” and profit.  The illegal wildlife trade is estimated to fetch $6-20 billion a year.

For a handsome fee of $20,000 to $50,000, tourists (such as stream in from Japan, the US, and Europe) can shoot about any species they want.  Most notoriously, lions and other animals are killed in “canned hunts” that confine animals (often domesticated and semi-drugged) within fenced enclosures.  The outcome is guaranteed, and the mighty warriors go home with a trophy to mount on the wall or decorate the floor. 

Whereas wildlife sanctuaries are banned in eight of South Africa's nine provinces, all provinces fully sanction captive-breeding and hunting ranches.  Currently, there are 9,000 privately owned ranches that employ 70,000 people who cater to the wants of foreign hunters in search of big game. 

Westerners would be astonished to realize the degree to which African “wildlife management” is a deceptive and fraudulent charade.  Quite commonly, animals are not protected in the park system, but rather are temporarily stored there as resources for future use.  The South African National Park (SANP) system has a long history of supplying animals such as rhinoceros, elephants, and lions to private landowners and hunting operators, while displaying complete indifference as to whether they end up in a city or roadside zoo, a circus, a laboratory, a canned hunting compound, or a slaughterhouse.  In the words of former Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Mohammed Valli Moosa, “I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to make an income out of these [parks].” 

If a park profits from animals and land, and puts the money back into sound care and management, it is difficult to object to this pragmatic speciesism given state budget constraints and the realities of global capitalist economies.  But “responsible stewardship” is hardly the hallmark of the SANP staff who regard animals as commodities and dispensable resources to be sold to the highest bidder and obligingly play their own critical part in the corporate pillage of the planet.  Parks and animals, like everything else, are viewed in the basest terms possible, as nothing but commodities that if lacking in economic value have no value at all.

Within this system that serves elite interests, “conservation” organizations are fronts for animal exploiters.   With the state and animal exploiters, “conservationists” advocate “sustainable use” policies that appear to be responsible “environmental management,” but in reality mask unsustainable levels of killing that are driving numerous species to the brink of extinction.  Perhaps most of all, US citizens would be outraged to learn that millions of their tax dollars subsidize elephant killing through Congressional funding of South African hunting lobbies. 

Pillage of the Pachyderms
“As long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace.  It is one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin . . . all such deeds are done in the name of 'social justice.'  There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.” Isaac Bashevis Singer

A dramatic indication of the bloodshed in the killing fields of Africa is the systematic pogrom against elephants -- the largest land mammals on earth and renown for their intellectual, emotional, and social complexity.  The rate of decimation is stunning.  In 1930, Africa was home to a lush population of 5-10 million elephants. Beginning in the 1960s, however, poachers and armies waged a vicious war of extermination against elephants, reducing their numbers to 1.3 million by 1979. Between 1970 and 1989, another million elephants were slaughtered for their ivory tusks.  According to one report, “Organized gangs of poachers used automatic weapons, profited from government corruption, and laundered tons of elephant tusks through several African countries to destinations in Eastern and Western countries.” 

 In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) passed a global ban on ivory.  Due to intense international pressure and threat of a tourism boycott, South Africa declared a moratorium on culling in 1995.  These measures helped to reduce elephant poaching, but illegal poaching and ivory trading still flourish.   Today, less than 600,000 elephants survive in the African wild.

Conservationists define the “culling” of elephants as “the managed alteration of a game populations numbers or compositions, when at odds with its resources, health and welfare, or man’s `interest.’”   Obscene abstractions such as the “management of elephant density” obscure the very concrete act of killing elephants by shooting them with tranquilizing darts from helicopters, allowing them to slowly and painfully suffocate and die, finishing off those still alive with a bullet to the head or a blade to their throat, and then dismembering and exploiting every penny’s worth from their mutilated bodies.  Once one clears the fog of semantic chicanery, moral posturing, and allegedly sound and objective science, it is clear that culling is a demonization and slaughter of the innocent.

Scapegoating Elephants 
“The way we treat animals has all the hallmarks of apartheid – prejudice, callous disregard for suffering, and a misguided sense of supremacy … group areas and segregation helped to keep the suffering of black people hidden from view.  So too with the animals.” South African journalist, Mantsadi Molotlegi

Amidst complaints that elephants trample crops, damage ecosystems, and endanger and often take human lives, it is clear that elephants are being scapegoated for problems they did not create and, in the form of habitat destruction, many critics argue does not exist.  The Canadian sealing industry blames seals for depleting fish population, thereby providing a justification for the slaughter of over 300,000 baby seals every year.   But it is the fishermen, not the seals, who are depleting the fish.  Similarly, African elephants are not responsible for ecological degradation and shrinking biodiversity, as the fault lies ultimately with human beings themselves. 

Buoyed by a growing human population and rapacious market demands, farmers, loggers, ranchers, hunters, and other commercial interests, have destroyed and diminished natural habitats, such that roaming elephants following traditional migration corridors sometimes come into “conflict” with swelling human communities, whether by eating farmers’ crop or attacking villagers.  But far before elephant numbers began to climb in certain areas, environments already were degraded by farming, slash-and-burn agriculture, ranching, timber, mining, and other exploitative industries.  Park mismanagement policies – such as creating waterholes so that tourists can watch animals congregate and drink water -- create ecological imbalances. 

Moreover, hunters themselves disrupt ecological balance and cause natural selection in reverse, as “they produce favoured species at the expense of the less favoured, overstock to keep up with demand, exterminate large predators and severely cull small ones … feed artificially, manipulate habitat as ordinary farmers do, introduce non-indigenous species and strains, and genetically manipulate wild animals.”   By taking animals with the biggest manes and horns and targeting the strong and healthy instead of the weak and sick, hunting interferes with animal social structures, natural ecologies, and the balance of nature.  The land, on hunting ranges possessed by private individuals, is “alternated and manipulated intensively, and this in turn has detrimental effects on the diversity and abundance of many bird species, small mammals and reptiles that depend on bush and forest habitats.  The biological and conservation value of privately owned commercial ranches are therefore very limited.” 

People demonize elephants as violent aggressors who attack villagers without asking why such behavior arises.  Like humans, chimpanzees, and other animals, elephants have complex minds and social structures.  In one dramatic instance of how violence to animals rebounds to affect human society, elephants who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by killing of and separation from family members, grow up psychologically damaged and are more likely to attack humans.  In such cases of “elephant aggression,” one should not blame the victim, but rather examine the causes of the behavior in human predation.

Culling itself exacerbates the very problem it intends to solve.  As one critic notes, “Removing elephants has an ecological impact too: Decimation of elephant populations by the ivory trade, especially the huge volumes trafficked in the 1800s, removed elephants over wide areas and had cascading impacts on vegetation and other species allowing tree species, such as marula and various acacias, to colonize and become established in a way that may have been unusual in ecological time.” 

Many critics question the root assumption and justification for culling, by emphasizing a lack of evidence for the claim that elephants are damaging environments and biodiversity.  As one skeptic writes, “Despite decades of draconian population management, there is little reliable evidence of the outcomes of elephant-habitat interactions, with respect to other species and to elephants themselves.  However, amidst this uncertainty, there is no evidence to support a reasonable expectation of imminent, irreversible damage to biodiversity, despite SANParks' claims to the contrary.  Examples often given within South Africa of elephants' catastrophic damage to ecosystems are, in fact, myths.  Tsavo National Park in Kenya was not destroyed (despite misleading reports to the contrary) and remains dynamic, with diverse and productive plant and wildlife communities.”   In comparison to some other conservation areas, “Kruger Park [the main target area for culling] is densely covered in bush …none of the 1,922 plant species in the Kruger Park are endangered, nor are any of the plant communities under threat.”  Ultimately, “there is little reason to fear that biodiversity is under imminent risk in Kruger … and every reason to believe that imaginative [non-violent] elephant management approaches can result in population mechanisms that will promote heterogeneity within the Park and actually increase biodiversity in the longer term.” 

Thus, if governmental agencies and conservation organizations are truly interested in protecting habits and species, it would seem more logical to target agriculture, commercial logging, game farming, park mismanagement, and hunting organizations rather than elephants.  Culling elephants is a hideous case of blaming the victim.  But logic matters little where politics prevails over “science” and special interest groups overwhelm the larger good of humans, animals, and the environment. 

Ecotourism and Non-Violent Means of “Elephant Management”
“A new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly repackaged.” Nelson Mandela

It is unthinkable to regard humans as mere problems, abstract masses devoid of individuality, a disturbance in ecosystems, or a drain on public resources to be removed by any means.  That was the attitude of Nazi Germany, which saw Jews, homosexuals, socialists, and others as genetic pollutants and social irritants that only a final solution could remove.  People certainly do not talk of “culling” human populations and making a profitable sport of it.   Why then do people promote the mass murder of beings renown for their intellectual, emotional, and social complexity? 

Fortunately, some groups are urging non-violent policies to elephant “management.”  Many South African communities and animal advocates worldwide have proposed that the best solution to the human-elephant conflict is through building networks of “eco-tourism” that market elephants to tourists who would visit South Africa principally to view elephants in the “wild” and whose dollars, euros, and yen would rebuild the economic infrastructure of states and communities. 

Ecotourism is a significant leap forward beyond culling and primitive exploitation of elephants in the hunting and trade industries, for it reverses priorities  -- by endowing elephants with more value alive than dead – as it potentially undoes and resolves the opposition between human and animal interests, such that what benefits elephants benefits humans as well, and vice versa.   Eco-tourism can help mitigate or dissolve the “conflict” between people and elephants where it exists, and enable people to see elephants in more positive terms, other than as mere commodities and resources.  To underscore this point, a hopeful sign of change is evident in the outlook of Muzarabani district chief executive, Luckson Chisanduro, who stated that, ''People are beginning to understand that there is a need to preserve the elephant, not just for the income but because it is our inheritance.”   Such insights lead not to actions that exclude elephants from communities with wire fences, but rather include them as a crucial part of their history, identity, and communities. 

If the sole focus of African orientation to elephants is on economics rather than ethics, on what benefits humans not animals, it is crucial to emphasize that there is far more economic value and gain in ecotourism than in animal farming and hunting.  As one report explains, “Value can be added more effectively to wildlife existence values through tourism, and related employment and service industries supporting … wildlife conservation, rather than treating the protected area as a farm for delivering animal products … revenue generation from tourism is significantly greater than from `cropping’ of wildlife, and photo-tourism offers greater opportunities for investment and added value than consumptive utilization …." 

In other words, African nations and communities will benefit in the long-term far more when Westerners come to shoot elephants with a camera rather than a gun and the elephant is treated as a vital part of the community rather than as an enemy or pest.  A complimentary tactic to ecotourism is organizing a massive boycott against traveling to South Africa should the government and park system resume, or threaten to resume, culling.  Given Western sentiments and spending power, “the potential risks to South Africa’s tourism industry if elephant culling is resumed are enormous; in 2002 tourism earned South Africa R72.5 billion (US$7.2 billion) in revenue (7.1% of GDP) and generated 1.15 million jobs.” 

Some groups have taken initiatives -- albeit from a speciesist perspective coached in the language of objectification – to promote “sustainable” elephant hunting.  In African countries such as Namibia, the World Wildlife Fund claims to be successfully teaching rural communities how to prosper through “sustainable natural resource management,” which includes “sale of thatching grass and crafts, tourist concessions, and revenues from trophy hunting” (my emphasis).  In a qualitative leap beyond this speciesist approach that promotes murdering elephants for human gain, another group provided poachers not with money derived from the slaughter of innocents but rather with alternative livelihoods by training them to become carpenters and involving them in a village sewing cooperative they launched. 

Ecotourism is problematic on moral and political levels because it does not break with the instrumentalist mindset that sees elephants in terms of extrinsic rather than intrinsic value, as “assets,” “funds,” “resources” rather than subjects of a life with meaning, purpose, and value in-and-for their own right.  The animal rights perspective renounces the oxymoronic “sustainable use” and “responsible hunting” policies promoted by speciesist conservationists and animal welfare groups.  The moral repugnance of ecotourism can be better recognized by comparing the utilitarian treatment of elephants with the exploitation of “primitive cultures” in human zoos or “tourist performances.” Neither people nor animals are harmed, and they benefit from their commodification and objectification (whether by living rather than dying at the hands of poachers, in the case of elephants, or by deriving money from their display, as might occur with indigenous cultures), but they are nonetheless viewed as means for the ends of another rather than ends-in-themselves, and thereby denigrated in significant ways.

The struggle for animal rights and liberation is a moral ideal and long-term goal, such that its moral purity and ultimate objectives exist in tension with pressing practical considerations and the urgent needs of the present defined by the rapid destruction of habitat, species extinction, and the current push of the SANP system to resume culling.  With this tension in mind – between immediate exigencies and long-range goals, between abstract ideals and concrete political complexities – I must admit that it is far better that South Africans instrumentalize elephants for their worth as living beings rather than as corpses and dismembered body parts for consumption and market trade.  Ecotourism may be the most realistic approach in the current context where global capitalism squeezes Africa from one side and, as a direct result, poverty exerts its crippling pressures from another side.  While ecotourism depends on democratization, it also can help foster the process since a key objective of ecotourism (economic benefit for the whole community) can only be realized within a society that overthrows corrupt elites, places power directly in the hands of community members themselves, and thereby ensures a relatively equal distribution of money. 

Within the constraints of this utilitarian, market-oriented, and humanist context, animal liberationists can work to further mitigate the “conflict” between people and elephants, and encourage African people to see elephants as allies rather than enemies, as fellow beings rather than pests, and as subjects rather than objects. 

One Struggle, One Fight
“Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all.” Nelson Mandela

Let’s be clear that the blame game runs both ways: we can justly claim that people steal from elephants and other species; that people are immense lethal threats to elephant lives, families, and communities.  Perhaps it is humans who should retreat and make room for elephants, and other species as well.  Elephants have roamed the African plains for sixty million years before humans evolved and claimed eminent domain over the entire planet; they are amazingly complex, social, and intelligent beings; and they have every right to live free of human violence, greed, exploitation, and interference of any kind.

Through a series of reports and press conferences in the last two years, the South African government and park system has made clear and menacing moves that they intent to resume the slaughter of thousands of elephants in the perverse Orwellian guise of “population management.” If there is an international outcry against elephant slaughter, and a well-organized threat of a tourist boycott, and a democratization process that can destroy the power of the hunting lobby, redistribute monetary resources, eradicate poverty, and nullify the motivation of many poor people who kill animals for sheer economic survival, the endangered elephant species of South Africa possibly can be saved. 

Vast social, political, and economic changes by themselves are inadequate, unless accompanied by equally profound psychological changes – that is, a Copernican revolution in human ethics and being, whereby people realize that they belong to the earth, and the earth does not belong to them.  Unless developed along with moral education, democratization may do little beyond broadening the power to kill.  With ethical education, people can learn to respect the earth and other species for their intrinsic value, not as a resource for their use and benefit.  One cannot expect peace, tolerance, community, and democracy in a country where such pathological violence is unleashed routinely on animals; the dominator mindset and cycle of violence has to be broken at every point.  Victims of oppression cannot advance by oppressing and victimizing others. 

Where humans fail to make the most profound changes – those involving their relationship to the vast living earth – political regime changes mean nothing to animals and perpetuate violence and social and ecological crises.  The “human-elephant conflict” is a microcosm of social and ecological crises unfolding throughout the world, and that humanity desperately needs to stop exploiting the world and find ways to harmonize society with nature.  The only true “sustainability” policies can emerge when humans learn to respect the earth and other species for their intrinsic value, not as a resource for their own use and benefit, and take their rightful place as citizens within a vast biocommunity in which all species have the right to live free of human harm and humans have profound responsibilities to protect their lives and habitat.

Notes
This paper would not have been possible without the inspiring influence and pioneering lead of Michele Pickover. The importance of her commitment to animal liberation and radical social change is manifest not only in her groundbreaking book, Animal Rights in South Africa -- the first systematic application of animal rights theory and politics to South Africa -- but also in her indefatigable activist achievements, such as in her work with Animal Rights Africa (www.animalrightsafrica.org) . Moreover, thanks to her kind invitation to speak throughout South Africa, I was able to experience the landscape, culture, and oppression of animals and people alike as concrete realities, and to witness how animal liberation is a global movement for change, and one that can achieve its goals only by working within a broader struggle for both human and animal liberation.
As one among many ominous signs that the South African government is moving toward a pro-culling policy, in February 2007 Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the South African Minister of Environmental Affairs & Tourism, released a “Draft Norms and Standards for the Management of Elephants” report (www.info.gov.za) that advocated the use of culling as one of many responses to resolving the alleged threat elephants pose to ecological systems and the lives and property of human beings.  In June 2007, at the 14th Conference of Parties of CITES in the Hague, numerous African elephant range states agreed on a nine year moratorium against ivory trade, but nonetheless allowed a one-year sell off of 60 tonnes of  ivory stockpiles on the global trade market (see Richard Black, “Africa Cut Deal on Ivory Trade,” BBC News, June 14, at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6751853.stm). To help legitimate this move, the South African Department of Environmental Affairs claims that the funds will be channeled into conservation efforts, but animal rights critics argue that the lucrative profits in fact land in the pockets of state officials, that any marketization of ivory, however “controlled,” encourages additional poaching, and  that the move was intended to relieve the pressure of existing stockpiles in order to replenish them by slaughtering thousands more elephants; see “CITES `Compromise’ Signifies Disaster for Elephants” (http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/PR_14June07_CitesCompromise.php) and other reports on the Animal Rights Africa website at: http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/AgonyOfIvory.php). 
  See “Consuming Wild Life: The Illegal Exploitation of Wild Animals
In South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia,” March 2007 (compiled by Mike Cadman
for Animal Rights Africa and Xwe African Wild Life), at: www.animalrightsafrica.org. On the international wildlife trade, also see: www.timesonline.co.uk. 
For an illuminating treatment of the global business of trophy and canned hunting, see Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), pp. 47-87. Scully describes how killing rare, huge, or endangered animals fetch hunters both money and status, along with, one presumes, a satisfying release of aggressive energy and galvanic boost to macho identity. Global hunting organizations such as the Safari Club elevate hunters to elite status if they bag enough big game, and the dream of every hunter who lives or travels to exotic places such as India or Africa is to kill over his or her hunting career an individual from the “Big Five”: buffalo, elephant, rhino, lion, and leopard.  The blatant commodification of killing wildlife is channeled through countless magazines such as Hunting Illustrated and African Hunter and websites such as AfricanSkyHunting (www.africanskyhunting.co.za) in order to lure tourists into expensive safari trips and “hunting packages.”
“South Africa wants to hedge in hunting,” May 3, 2006, iafrica.com: (http://cooltech.iafrica.com/science/289452.htm). 
Cited in Michele Pickover, Animal Rights in South Africa (Wetton, Cape Town: Double Storey Books), p. 104.
See “The Elephant Lobby,” Newsweek, September 8, 1997, pp. 60-61.
“Elephant Ivory Trade Ban,” online at: www.american.edu/ted/elephant.htm. 
Although a ban was put in place in 1989 it was subsequently lifted at the 1997 CITES meeting as a result of pressure from Southern Africa. CITES thereby eased the total ban on the international ivory market by allowing trade to be reopened from southern Africa to Japan. South Africa continues to pressure CITES meeting for new concessions in the hopes of a full-scale reopening of the ivory trade.
With China, Japan, and other nations vying for position in ivory markets, the US is the world’s leading buyer of illegal ivory; see the Care for the Wild International report at: “U.S. Exposed as Leading Ivory Market,” at:  www.careforthewild.com. 
Cited in Pickover, Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 109.
For brutal photographic evidence of the horrors of culling, see: http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/Elephant_Gallery.php. 
Pickover, Animal Rights in South Africa, p. 68. 
Ibid., p. 69. The dynamic is similar to the US, where hunters make the same ecological arguments for killing deer and other species. In many cases, deer overpopulation is the result of hunting, whereby hunters kill natural predators of deer such as coyotes and wolves. On the violent psychosis of hunters and the myths and fallacies of hunting, see “Hunting: The War on Wildlife” (www.animalrightsafrica.org and “The Myth of Trophy Hunting as Conservation” (http://www.animalrightsafrica.org/TrophyHunting.php).
  See Charles Siebert, “An Elephant Crackup?” The New York Times, October 8, 2006, at: www.nytimes.com. 
  See “Elephant Management in South Africa: The Need to Think BIG,” at www.careforthewild.com.
  Ibid.
  Ibid.
  For one example of how local economies are better supported through conserving rather than poaching wildlife, see “Antipoaching patrols help wildlife more than local economic development,” at: www.animalrightsafrica.org
  “Where the Elephants Pay Their Way,” The New York Times, April 12, 1997.
  “Elephant Management in South Africa: The Need to Think BIG.”
  Ibid.
  “The Challenge of the New Millennium,” at: www.assets.panda.org.
  Delia Owens interviewed by Steve Curwood, transcript posted online at: www.loe.org. 
  Consider, for example, the plight of the African rhinoceros population whose habitat is rapidly being consumed by human industry and out-of-control appetites: "Every landscape where the Asian rhino clings precariously to survival is suffering from the pressures of agricultural clearance, logging, encroachment by people in search of land, and commercial plantations for oil palm, wood pulp, coffee, rubber, cashew and cocoa” (Elizabeth Kemf and Nico van Strien, cited at www.awionline.org). Other contributing causes include the canned hunting industry and the superstition-laden “alternative medicine” markets of Asia.
 

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