SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 158

poachers were now organized in gangs with high-powered rifles and well-trained scouts.
They were able to hunt and kill 100,000 elephants a year, a rate not seen since the
Europeans first arrived in droves at the turn of the twentieth century. The market for ivory
soared with the newly available elephant tusks and rhino horns.
Ironically the movie Out of Africa was released in 1985 at the height of the massacres.
While moviegoers thrilled at the panoramic shots of antelopes stampeding across the
plains of colonial Kenya and of elephants charging hunters in the colonial days of East
Africa, the real live elephants in Kenya were being decimated. From 1975 to 1989, Kenya's
elephant population dropped 83 percent.
This wholesale slaughter of elephants moved from a conservation issue to one of eco-
nomic importance. Tourism was being devastated at a time when African countries were
counting on that industry to earn foreign exchange. Between villagers encroaching on the
wild parks and gangs poaching for ivory, elephant herds were disappearing.
It finally occurred to officials that elephants, one of the most iconic animals on the
planet, were being threatened with extinction. Alarmed, officials banned the international
trade in ivory in 1989 in order to save the elephant and the rhino, through the Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES.
To insure that poachers were stopped, several African nations took drastic new measures
to protect and recover their herds. In Kenya the government turned to Richard Leakey, a
white Kenyan born to one of the most illustrious families of paleontologists in the world.
Leakey was appointed director of Kenya's Wildlife Department in 1989 even though he
had limited experience in the field organizing safaris and had been running the National
Museums of Kenya. He was given the task of revitalizing the parks and saving its beasts,
especially the elephants. As it happens, Leakey's experience and the approach he deve-
loped are a microcosm of the battles waged by conservationists across eastern and south-
ern Africa. They had to face down well-armed poachers and inept or corrupt governments
while rebuilding the wildlife parks and wildlife services. They were saving a natural order
of savannah and wildlife and a way of life. Their governments' motivations were less clear.
What is certain is that the salvation of the tourism industry in Africa would depend
on the success of a handful of wildlife administrators. After taking over the wildlife
service, Leakey said the economic health of the country depended on these animals. “The
slaughter of our elephants is economic sabotage: elephants are the flagship species of our
wildlife and the basis for Kenya's biggest industry, tourism.”
To make his point, Leakey ordered the unthinkable. To show that Kenya would no
longer tolerate poaching elephants or selling their ivory tusks, Leakey held a public bonfire
and burned 2,000 tusks government park rangers had captured from poachers. Normally
the government sells the ivory and deposits the money in the treasury. To destroy the tusks
was the equivalent of burning $3 million. Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi was initially
taken aback but quickly agreed and actually lit the pyre. That act would show that Kenya