Treated like a commodity, bought and sold like furniture, elephant communities are being ripped apart.
While a lot of attention is being paid to poaching and the ivory trade, elephant trading is continuing in Zimbabwe.
Lurching from one crisis to another, the elephants of Africa have never been under a greater threat — and if current trends continue, the African elephant population will be extinct by 2020. Speeding the disappearance of the African elephant is an alarming new trend of selling them off to the highest bidder.
The social aspects of elephant communities are well documented, as is the pain and suffering endured by elephants and their calves when separated. As much as you would feel the anguish of one of your family members being kidnapped, so too do these majestic animals suffer the pain of the loss.
Zimbabwe is now allowing calves to be ripped from their mothers and sold off to anyone willing pay in unprecedented numbers. More disturbingly, the Zimbabwean government has indicated that many more elephants and other animals might be similarly captured from the wild, to be crated up and shipped off to international buyers.
Please sign this urgent petition for elephants! Urge Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe to ban live export of the country's elephants and step-up efforts to combat criminal poaching.
President Mugabe,
I urge you to do more to protect your country's imperiled elephants.
Do you want your grandchildren to only see what am elephant looked like from pictures in a history book? Do you want to lose the valuable income that elephant tourism generates? Do you want to be mentioned in those same history books as the president who allowed some of Africa's most majestic animals to disappear, never to be seen again?
[Your comments]
It is not too late to act. Please ban live elephant exports and step up your government's efforts to stop criminal elephant poaching.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
