Chantal Lyons2013-05-19T08:18:40-04:00Chantal Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=chantal-lyonsCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Chantal LyonsGood old fashioned elbow grease.Time to Legalise the Trade in Rhino Horn?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27926962013-03-05T19:00:00-05:002013-05-05T05:12:01-04:00Chantal Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/chantal-lyons/want the trade in rhino horn to be legalised, by selling shavings harvested from the horns of live rhinos in the hope that poachers won't just hack their faces off instead.
The price of rhino horn has rocketed from $4,700 per kilo in 1993 to $65,000 per kilo in 2012. The article's authors claim that this is due to the ban on the trade and the resultant scarcity of horn in the international market. But this ignores the fact that the economies of various Asian countries have experienced massive growth, enabling more and more people to afford the product. Increasing affluence has been attributed to the similarly increasing demand for and price of elephant ivory, so it is not a huge leap in logic to suspect a similar causation with rhino horn.
Another claim of the authors that should be contended is that anaesthetising rhinos and taking shavings from their horns can be done without harming the animals themselves. As anyone who works with rhinos (or for that matter, any kind of animal) could tell you, anaesthetisation is always fraught with danger. Only last year in a tragic irony a rhino died under anaesthetic while its horn was being tainted to deter poachers. To feasibly keep up with global demand for rhino horn - if indeed this is possible at all - every rhino in Africa would need to be regularly anaesthetised to harvest the shavings. Undoubtedly a great deal of them would die in the process. It would also be an extremely stressful experience for the animals irrespective of fatalities, potentially affecting their health and reproductive rates in the long-term.
But if these issues could be overcome, could a legal trade save rhinos?
Sun bears and moon bears, threatened in the wild, are now farmed for a thriving Asian industry. They are harvested for their bile, popular for its medicinal uses. The bears are kept in cages so small they will never stand up in all their lives, while their bodies suffer permanent wounds so that bile can be siphoned straight from their gall bladders. Cruelty aside, legal farms were introduced to meet demand for bear bile and so reduce the poaching of wild bears. Yet in the years since, demand has increased and so has poaching, indicating that either farming has changed nothing or it is in fact driving demand. Certainly bear bile has become more popular, to the point where it is now used even in non-medicinal products like shampoo and wine.
Time and time again, introducing previously scarce animal products into markets has stimulated demand. It has been witnessed with bear bile and elephant ivory, and as with bears the proliferation of tiger farms may well be fuelling tiger poaching. It could be even more disastrous for rhinos. Their horn is not bought for mere trinkets as with ivory, and although tiger products are believed among other things to improve virility these are benefits that people can, ultimately, choose to live without. But traditional Asian beliefs hold rhino horn to be capable of curing maladies as serious as cancer. If you truly believed there was a product that could cure you or a loved one of a fatal illness, and you could afford it, would you hesitate?
It's utterly stupid to think that keratin from a rhino horn will cure your cancer, but this belief will consign rhinos to extinction if left unchallenged. Creating a legal market in rhino horn and using the revenue to fund conservation efforts would be one step forward and two steps back if it also fuelled demand.
Instead we must continue to spread awareness and educate people, even if it is a slow, hard fight. To legalise the trade in rhino horn would be to undo all our efforts so far; we would essentially be proclaiming our support for a baseless traditional belief. We also cannot look at the issue of rhino horn in isolation to other species accorded similar uses in Asian traditions. All pangolin species are now threatened or endangered due to demand for their scales, which are believed to have medicinal properties (sound familiar?). If we encourage people to believe that rhino horn does cure cancer as tradition would have, these assumptions will surely bleed into the markets for products from other kinds of animals.
To seek to erode such beliefs is not to disparage the cultures that host them. But what is the point in allowing ignorance to drive entire species to destruction? Preventing poaching and using education to reduce the demand for products from endangered animals will not prevent the extinction of these animals on their own. But it would be a real start.]]>Is Mass Extinction the End of the World?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27283942013-02-20T17:49:59-05:002013-04-22T05:12:01-04:00Chantal Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/chantal-lyons/Extinction: Not the End of the World? and according to this review it asks questions that might make the average conservationist squirm: are we merely hastening the demise of already-doomed species, and how have we benefited from previous extinctions?
Some might leap on these questions as an insinuation that we shouldn't be so worried about the human-induced mass extinction that is, according to the data, currently underway with as many as 50,000 species becoming extinct each year. As for the future,
the results reveal 21 percent of all known mammals, 30 percent of all known amphibians, 12 percent of all known birds, and 28 percent of reptiles, 37 percent of freshwater fishes, 70 percent of plants, 35 percent of invertebrates assessed so far are under threat.
It is indisputable that the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago paved the way for the rise of mammals and, eventually, us. And some animals today hardly seem to help their own cause, like the pandas that refuse to have sex or the Kakapo parrots whose defence strategy consists of running up trees, trying to fly (they can't) and promptly flopping back down to earth. Natural selection is one of the key mechanisms of evolution and the doom of many a species. The most successful species are those which can adapt most effectively to their environments. The ones which can't, die out. This seems fair enough. 'Background extinction' - the standard rate of extinction external to catastrophic changes - is calculated to be one species going extinct every 1-10 years. But in the human-ruled Holocene this rate has rocketed.
We are directly and indirectly threatening the existence of countless species through the harvesting of them and the destruction of their habitats. Among the more well-known species we have already lost are the Great Auk, Stellar's Sea Cow, the Baiji White Dolphin, and the Passenger Pigeon. The Passenger Pigeon, hunted to death, serves as a worrying example of the consequences of extinction; it is believed to have had important ecological roles such as the seeding of forest and keeping populations of Lyme disease-carrying ticks in check. So what will the impending removal of so many more species from the biosphere mean for our future?
Nature's extraordinary resilience is born of diversity. Ecosystems are complex webs of interactions between species, with such abundance of different species that usually when one falters another is able to take its place. When an ecosystem undergoes a change, such as the arrival of a non-native species, the more diverse it is the better its chances of adapting are. At a time when other pressures like climate change are already placing ecosystems under severe stress, it seems unthinkable that we still directly and remorselessly drive species towards extinction, or at least to the point at which their numbers become so small that they can no longer carry out their ecological roles. An ecosystem that haemorrhages species will eventually collapse, and so will the lives of any people who depend on it.
But it is more than just that. The oft-used 'tree of life' represents perfectly the evolution and diversity of life on Earth, each branch and offshoot representing a lineage. The human race is close to hacking off many of those branches, destroying all kinds of life forms. No species lasts forever, but many evolve or are survived by genetic relations. We may have lost the mammoths but we still have the elephants, for now. Most if not all cat species, big and small, are threatened; will our housecats be all that remains of the Felidae family one day? It may sound obvious but by destroying species in the present, we also destroy the potential of species that do not yet exist. The reign of humankind requires a redefinition of 'natural selection'.
It can be difficult to extricate the consequences of extinction from the consequences of other environmental damage, but we already have examples of where it has had a calculable effect on humans. Tony Juniper in his book What Has Nature Ever Done For Us? explains how the near-complete loss of several vulture species due to the use of a particular antibiotic in livestock has so far caused the deaths of around 50,000 people. The reasons are that without vultures to compete with, feral dogs gorged on dead livestock and their population exploded, precipitating a huge increase in the number of people dying of rabies; secondly, as the dogs could not clean carcasses as efficiently as the vultures, anthrax proliferated.
A tree cannot survive if you take too many of its branches. You can still call it natural selection if you want. But only so long as you don't mind the same rules applying to the human race. Mass extinction will not be the end of the world, but it may well be the end of our world.]]>The Injustice of Overpopulationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26413852013-02-10T19:00:00-05:002013-04-12T05:12:01-04:00Chantal Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/chantal-lyons/Enough Food For Everyone IF campaign. Its ambition is to eliminate global hunger. It names the four issues which it believes to be the keystones of this ambition: Aid, Tax, Land and Transparency. But I was astonished that there was absolutely no mention of something equally, if not even more, important: overpopulation.
The global human population now numbers 7 billion and, even if our growth is now slowing as some believe, we are heading for disaster. All around the world the costs of our success are evident: to name but a few, forest cover is shrinking by 13 million hectare per year, numerous fish species have experienced total collapse, and climate change looms.
Much environmental degradation could be lessened if we were to rein in our overconsumption. North America and West Europe are responsible for 60 percent of private consumption spending while overall, global human demand exceeds what the Earth can give - currently we're using 1 and a half planet's worth of resources per year. It might become 2 planets' worth by 2030 if current population trends continue.
Most population growth is happening in the developing world. The clue is in the name - many developing nations are on their way up, both in terms of economics and population, and their citizens understandably aspire to the lifestyle we already enjoy in the developed world. But the environmental problems that the world faces won't be remedied simply by addressing overconsumption. Similar to how our increasing use of electronics easily offsets their improving efficiency, 'greening' the way we use the planet's resources will achieve little when more and more people require them.
I'm sure many people tuned in to the last episode of Africa a few nights ago. David Attenborough used the episode to give us some frightening facts: Africa's population is currently around the 1 billion mark, and is growing at double the global rate, a trend expected to continue. Africa is a vast continent, but as a result of human pressures it is steadily losing natural resources like forests. 90% of its people are dependent on wood for their main energy source. Even if commercial logging and agriculture were somehow reduced in scope, the needs of the burgeoning population would still have to be accommodated. But the damaging of ecosystems always incurs costs. There is growing scientific evidence that rainforests generate rain, even as far as affecting the global climate, while it is accepted knowledge that vegetation prevents soil erosion and thus the spread of desert and wasteland. Combined with climate change, Africa may well be facing a future of droughts and, ultimately, human suffering on a scale we've not yet seen.
Endeavouring to curb population growth can only be a positive thing. Many of the actions we could take are intrinsically humanitarian in themselves. Improving access to education and family planning for women encourages them to have fewer children and gives them more control over their own lives. Preventing death from causes like malaria and starvation fosters a sense of assurance that parents do not need to have large families to ensure that at least some of their children make it to adulthood (this is where the IF campaign could fit in perfectly - if only it would make overpopulation one of its 'issues'). In a similar vein, stable states with functioning welfare systems reduce the incentive for parents to have large families as a means of ensuring that they will be cared for in old age. For some countries, these 'soft' actions might have to be bolstered by legal limits on reproduction. Such limits may result in social dysfunctions, as with sex-selective abortion in China . But they may turn out to be the lesser evil.
Which of the following paths is more feasible? To persuade people in developed countries to give up much of what they take for granted, or to persuade everyone to have less children? We must choose at least one of these if we don't want to be pulled down the third path: population crash. Such a fate has been forecast before and seemingly averted; the 'Green Revolution' of the mid 20th century ushered in methods of intensive farming that have kept the world fed since (well, some of the world). But the cost has been the proliferation of fertiliser which leaches into the oceans and damages our food sources there; antibiotics which encourage the evolution of disease; and the continued removal of the forests and vegetation which hold soil together, keep back deserts, and produce much of the rain and waterways which people across the globe depend on.
The WorldWatch Institute writes "the world's poorest will need to increase their level of consumption if they are to lead lives of dignity and opportunity". If we truly want to see a world where social and environmental justice are realised together, we must all change.]]>Why the Trade in Ivory Must Be Bannedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25830772013-01-31T12:55:08-05:002013-04-02T05:12:01-04:00Chantal Lyonshttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/chantal-lyons/Elephant family killed" -- such headlines are becoming depressingly regular. The global moratorium on the trade of ivory in 1989 by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was supposed to protect elephants from further devastation, after their numbers in Africa were reduced from five million in the 1930s to just 690,000 in the 1980s. Indeed, for a while the ban succeeded, with the price of ivory crashing and elephants granted a reprieve. But within the last decade the numbers being poached have rocketed. In 2011 alone over 25,000 elephants were slaughtered, CITES calculates. Their Asian cousins face a similar threat. If the trend of recent years continues, elephants might cease to exist within the next few decades.
While the ivory trade suffered under the 1989 ban, it survived through concessions by CITES, with ivory obtained 'pre-ban' remaining legal. Sell-offs of ivory harvested from culls have also been permitted by CITES sporadically. But the recent sharp rise in both elephant killings and seizures of illegal ivory, with an unprecedented 38.8 tonnes of it seized in 2011 in total, point to the phenomenal comeback of a trade unsatisfied by legal ivory.
The cost of the trade is terrible. Scientific research and anecdotal evidence from people who have spent their lives living with and studying elephants have painted a picture of a creature that is as extraordinarily complex as humans themselves. Elephants are already known for 'mourning' their dead; but the people who know them intimately speak of an intuition bordering on prescience, and a capacity for emotion as great as our own. What then must go through the mind of a young elephant which witnesses its mother or its whole family gunned down and hacked to pieces? Daphne Sheldrick, who runs the Nairobi Elephant Orphanage, has a very good idea; she has had to watch many calves starve themselves to death in their grief.
There is a human cost to the illegal trade too. In the high-stakes war of ivory, poachers shoot and kill dozens of park rangers each year, and the rangers return in kind. In another worrying development, The New York Times recently reported that armed groups in Africa were hunting down elephants and selling the ivory to buy weapons. The ivory trade is helping to perpetuate human misery on the African continent.
To understand the resurgence of the trade, one should look to rise of China's economy. As CITES and many others have pointed out, it corresponds closely with poaching trends and the inflation of ivory's value, the latter having doubled in just six years between 2004 and 2010 to $700 per kilo. Most ivory, legal and illegal, ends up in China. The Chinese have long prized ivory, as a means of displaying wealth and to curry favor among business associates. While some ivory originates from culls or is genuinely antique, the sheer number of elephants being poached shows that legal sources of ivory cannot satisfy consumers' appetites. Since the economic ascent of China does not look likely to falter anytime soon, there is only one way to save elephants from extinction by poaching: a complete and permanent global ban on the trade of ivory.
CITES undermined the 1989 moratorium by allowing the trade in pre-ban ivory to continue and later by approving sell-offs of ivory harvested from culls. The existence of a legal ivory market has created opportunity for its illegal counterpart, with smugglers taking advantage of consumers' inability to recognize what is not illegal, and the desire for cheaper ivory. Yet the moratorium did achieve real change for a time, if the brief stabilization of elephant numbers in the 1990s is anything to go by. But ivory stock sell-offs cause consumers to think that the trade is 'open for business' and so fuel appetite, the Environmental Investigation Agency argues. This makes a dangerous combination with China's growing affluence. Thus a new, no-exceptions ban would be vital to ensuring a robust solution to the problem of ivory.
Education will be needed alongside a ban, to impress on consumers the human and animal cost of the ivory trade. According to a recent survey by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, 70 percent of Chinese consumers sampled thought that tusks fall off living elephants naturally. But education alone will not save elephants. The Tusk Trust has said that China already has the wealth to buy the tusks of every elephant (and the horn of every rhino) on the planet. Time is running out.]]>