THE TRUTH OF BLOOD BEADS
ELEPH A N TS SK I N N ED TO M A K E
BLOOD BE A DS The poach i ng of A f r ica n elepha nts’ ivor y t usk s is wel l doc u mented. But ha l f way a round t he world i n Mya n ma r, t heir cousi ns, t he A sia n elepha nts, a re ten ti mes more v u l nerable. A nd a re now faci ng a g row i ng new t h reat – bei ng hunted for t heir sk i n.
BY MARIE KJELLSDOTTER
The research team in Myanmar ‘stumbled across’ a frightening discovery during a routine tracking study at the end of 2014. Peter Leimgruber, Head of Environmental Conservation Ecology at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, explains what happened in an interview with PBS NewsHour. “It was actually a big shock. During our monitoring of elephants with GPS collars, we suddenly noticed that some elephants disappeared. Their collars stopped working, and they were gone,” Leimgruber explains and elaborates further, “We had 19 elephants with GPS collars and we knew that five of them had fallen victim to poaching as we had found them dead. And then there were two that had just vanished. Their movement patterns had changed just before their disappearance, in a way that indicated that they were probably also killed by poachers.” After extended search efforts between 2015 and 2017, the research team ended up finding a total of 45 dead elephants in a very limited area. The scope of the poaching was surprising. In contrast to African elephants who live on the open savannah, Asian elephants prefer the jungle’s seclusion, making them very difficult to hunt. 54
PHOTO: ELEPHANT FAMILY
“Even our ‘trackers’ have to spend countless hours in order to get through the dense terrain when locating elephants to equip them GPS collars,” states John McEvoy, one of the researchers on site in Myanmar. Before 2014, poaching of Asian elephants was a relatively rare phenomenon as only some of the males, but not all, have tusks. But with this new skin poaching trend, the poachers now target adult males, adult females, and calves, threatening the whole species. Due to reduced living space, there are only 2,000 wild elephants left in Myanmar (2018), which means that at the current rate, hunting elephants for their skin could wipe out the Myanmar elephant completely within the next 50 years. “Lots of buyers prefer to buy the elephant skin unprocessed by the kilo, to be sure that it’s genuine elephant skin,” says Belinda Stewart-Cox from Elephant Family, an organization working to save the Asian elephant. Since the end of 2014, Elephant Family has charted poaching and black market trade in elephant skin, which has shown that China is the largest market for elephant skin from Myanmar. “Some skin is sold cut into smaller cubes, which are dried and
