National Geographic describes Nature’s adaptation to humanity’s lust for ivory:
THE OLDEST ELEPHANTS wandering Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park bear the indelible markings of the civil war that gripped the country for 15 years: Many are tuskless. They’re the lone survivors of a conflict that killed about 90 percent of these beleaguered animals, slaughtered for ivory to finance weapons and for meat to feed the fighters.
Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a third of younger females—the generation born after the war ended in 1992—never developed tusks. Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants.
I hope elephants taste bad, too. Or are even poisonous. Massacring these big animals for their tusks may be perfectly acceptable to local morality, but I am a child of Western Civ – and find that activity to be consumeristic and repellent.
My best wishes to the elephants of Africa. Perhaps your legends will speak of the time when you bore the great tusks – and paid the ultimate price for the privilege.
