World Elephant Day 2017: Milwaukee Zoo Steps Up Ivory Ban Drive

MILWAUKEE, WI — Just how does an elephant walk? That’s one of the questions the staff at the Milwaukee County Zoo will answer during the Saturday, Aug. 2, observance of World Elephant Day, a day set aside to raise awareness of the soul-crushing plight of elephants in the wild.

The Milwaukee Zoo activities take place from 11 a.m-1 p.m. Besides trying to walk like an elephant and pick up food with their “trunks,” visitors will also be able to tour the elephants’ night quarters and learn more about their lives.

Sentient, gentle elephants lead rich emotional lives with values similar to humans’, but have been driven to the brink of extinction by habitat destruction for cash crops and, more jarring, hunters who mercilessly rip out their ivory tusks while they’re still alive, then leave them to die excruciating, slow deaths from hemorrhage.

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Conservationists warn that at the rate elephants are disappearing, their species could be wiped out in Asia and Africa with 12 years. Asian elephants number only about 40,000 and are classified as “endangered” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. There are about 400,000 remaining in Africa, where they are classified as “vulnerable.”

A focus of the Milwaukee Zoo event will be to add more signatures to a petition for an ivory ban in Wisconsin. Last year, new rules announced by the Obama administration were a near-complete ban on the multi-billion-dollar ivory trade.

Seven states have now added an extra layer of protection, and elephant advocates in a handful of others, including Wisconsin, are asking for similar legislation.

“Ninety-six elephants die every day in Africa because of poaching,” Milwaukee Zoo spokeswoman Jennifer Diliberti-Shea told Patch earlier this year, adding that the United States is one of the leading destinations for ivory imports. At that rate, an elephant dies every 15 minutes. They’re dying at a higher rate than new calves are born — the gestation period is 22 months — and if the trend continues, African elephants will become extinct within 25 years.

Here are five things you can do right now to affect elephant survival rates:

1. Don’t buy ivory, and if you have ivory heirlooms sitting around the house, crush them and have a burial ceremony with your kids in the back yard. Crushing events take place on massive scales — just last week, state and federal environmental and conservation officials in Albany, New York, crushed a ton of illegal ivory trinkets worth a staggering $6 million — and family-centered ivory disposals can help kids connect with a species that “demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness and social intelligence,” Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter said, adding: “But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.”

2. Support one of 10 elephant conservation projects in critical landscapes through The Bodhi Tree Foundation’s ‘Power of 10’ initiative. Each of the projects focuses on countering the forces that threaten elephants — poaching, habitat loss, human-elephant conflict, and a lack of vital rehabilitation and veterinary care. Some of the projects are funded, but others are in dire need of support. The Bodhi Tree Foundation says 100 percent of donations go directly to the project of the donor’s choosing.

3. Be an informed consumer. Don’t buy coffee that isn’t fair-trade or shade-grown, and avoid products containing palm oil — warning, that’s going to be tough because it’s the most widely used vegetable oil in the world, but possible. Coffee and oil palm plantations have decimated elephant habitat. Also, make sure wood products are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

4. Adopt an elephant through organizations such as the World Wildlife Foundation, World Animal Foundation, Born Free and Defenders of Wildlife. You’ll get pictures of “your” elephant, as well as the satisfaction that you’re helping those organizations stop poaching and other threats to elephant survival.

5. If you want to experience elephants, be aware that many used for entertainment purposes are mistreated, sometime terribly so. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ decision to retire its last working elephants reflected the public’s growing understanding of elephant intelligence and distaste for activities that exploit them, and the travel website Trip Adviser is no longer booking excursions to attractions with captive animals, including elephant rides, but exploitation still happens. If you’re planning on experiencing elephants in the wild, make sure you choose eco-friendly tourism options.

How Humans Are Changing Elephants

If you want to know more about how human behavior is altering elephant behavior, check out the fascinating read published in 2006 by The New York Times titled “An Elephant Crackup?”

Among the conclusions: Young male elephants are running amuck across Africa, India and Asia, goring children in villages where they once peacefully co-existed with humans, because decades of ivory poaching, habitat loss and other threats have disrupted the fabric of elephant life and the societal and familial structures under which young elephants are raised and, essentially, kept in line.

The slaughter is traumatic for young elephants and profoundly changes them, psychologist Gay Bradshaw told The Times.

‘‘The loss of elephant elders and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants,” said Bradshaw, who at the time was doing research for what became the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity.

Photo by Ian Walton/Getty Images News/Getty Images