The Elephant Listening Project Kiev's troops have big Nazi problem - ex-US soldier who escaped Ukraine; DESTRUCTION OF OUR CULTURE HAS SUCCEEDED; Most Ukrainian Soldiers On Bakhmut Front-Line Killed 'Within 4 Hours' URGENT: mRNAs jabs may have caused tens of millions of serious new health problems worldwide, a huge peer-reviewed study shows Members of the Ugandan armys dog-tracking team lift weights at the African Union base in Obo, CAR. It was several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. After Lucienne Lanziwas husband died in an LRA attack on Garamba, she got a modest stipend. In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, a screener at Tanzanias airport accuses Bryan Christy of smuggling. Konys response was immediate and savage. Zakouma National Park has lost nearly 90 percent of its elephants since 2002. They killed fewer elephants per hunt but were much harder to track and stop. And I was like, ooh, what's this? I didn't go looking for this. In fact, she tells us, two weeks later she went back to the bai something we found pretty astonishing given the circumstances of the civil war. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. As in eye colour and blood type in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. It consists of a battery capable of lasting more than a year, a GPS receiver, an Iridium satellite transceiver, and a temperature sensor. It is assumed that the girls were raped, so its difficult for them to find husbands. All of central Africa is a hand grenade, its pin pulled by a history of resource exploitation from abroad, dictatorships, and poverty. They say the more elephants they kill, the more ivory they get.. From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. Widows now get a sum equal to six years of a rangers salary. 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Female elephants do use their tusks, but female elephants in Mozambique are doing just fine without them, according to Long. To me, it seems reasonable to think that the radiomans defection might have slowed the progress of the 25 elephants tusks headed to Kony. So I said to myself, 'I better go into a very passive mode.' Soldiers Kill Wild Elephant. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? Will artificial tusks planted in a central African country head eastor westtoward a coast with reliable transportation to Asian markets? This limited the trade of some ivory, but trade still continued across the world. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. While Dante set about embedding Kermeens tracker inside his tusk mold, a third team member, John Flaig, a specialist in near-space, balloon-based photographyimages taken from at least the height of spy planeswas preparing to monitor the tusks as they moved. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. From Garamba, Kony sent an exploratory team to Darfur to look into forging a new relationship with the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), who had supported him against Uganda, hoping to exchange ivory for rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons. The park has four mounted ranger teams because horses are the only way to effectively patrol during the wet season, when the elephants head to drier land outside the park. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . To follow my artificial tusks from the jungle to their final destination, I need a tracking device capable of transmitting exact locations without dead zones. Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist now at Princeton University, was curious about the elephants of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, where tuskless elephantswhich are all femaleare unusually common. Elephants without tusks were normally. But we also discovered field biologist Andrea Turkalo, who's now a conservation scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. They all report to him, they all obey him. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. MCCAMMON: Those changes can ripple through ecosystems. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project, Former Commando Turns Conservationist To Save Elephants Of Dzanga Bai. So support charities who put a stop to that. Six years later, on October 25, 2014, Onen tells me, his poaching mission to Garamba was scheduled to deliver its ivory to Kony in Sudan. Garamba is managed through a partnership between the DRCs wildlife department and African Parks, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa. At that time, about 18% of females there were born without tusks. Its not a secret to anyone that Konys in Sudan, says the State Departments Marty Regan. But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory. DNA suggests that some of the ivory is from elephants killed in May 2013 at Dzanga Bai in CAR. But that's not the end of the story. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? Issa, who is Chadian, said he joined the team of three Sudanese men and that together they rode more than two weeks to get to Heban, where they killed nine elephants in four days. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. I spend a night in police custody, where Im given a desk to sleep on. During those years Sudanese poachers arrived in groups of more than a dozen armed men, camping inside the park for months at a time, killing, in one instance, 64 elephants in a single hunt. Zakouma breathes its elephants. For his Judas pig project he built GPS satellite collars to enable pest control authorities in New Zealand to send feral pigs into the bush and locate their invasive piggy friends. Now, says the parks director, Rian Labuschagne, of African Parks, my biggest fear is that theyll start coming in pairs.. It was supposed to be a short posting, but he saw too much death to leave. Onen is short and looks even smaller wearing a camouflage-patterned Ugandan army uniform thats too long for him in the sleeves. During the failed peace talks with Uganda, while Kony hid in Garamba from 2006 to 2008, Onen had been assigned to Konys lead peace negotiator, Vincent Otti. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. Campbell-Staton points out that other species in Gorongosa rely on elephants having tusks to dig up holes for water and strip bark from trees. Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. An estimated 25,000 elephants are killed every year in Africa for their tusks, double the number killed in 2007. Its easier to live with things, she says. Its another example of the imprint of [human] effect on nature, says wildlife ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, who was not involved in the research. For example, tuskless motherswho would have had one copy of the dominant tuskless gene, from their own mothershad the same number of daughters with and without tusks. You did exactly what you were supposed to do, I said, shaking their hands. 4. Seleka and its rival, anti-Balaka, have set fire to people, thrown them off bridges, and murdered people wantonly, turning CAR into a lawless statethe kind of place where Konys group and other terrorist organizations thrive. It sort of found me. The biggest is why a dominant gene associated with deadly effects for males would persist in the population during periods without poaching. So why elephants? We need your help to protect elephants and report on wildlife crime. In 2012 as many as a hundred Sudanese and Chadian poachers on horseback rode across central Africa into Cameroons Bouba Ndjidah National Park. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors who can deal not just with poachers, but with civil war, too. " Turkalo and the other women stopped their boat, afraid they'd be fired on if they kept going. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground. According to Col. Mike Kabango, of the African Union forces, the image shows a large tent and two smaller ones; to Ryan Stage, a remote-sensing specialist in Colorado, it shows a large truck and two small tents. But a computer simulation, which examined the probability of tusked and tuskless females surviving the war, suggested the increase in tuskless females was far more likely to have resulted from selection, the team reports online today in Science. Froment uses the word war to describe the fight Garambas 150 rangers are in with poachers. "There's such a blizzard of depressing news about biodiversity and humans in the environment and I think it's important to emphasise that there are some bright spots in that picture. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army . Show your work. After six hours on the dark river, they got to safety, to a campsite in the Congo. Michael K. Nichols/National Geographic/Getty Images. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint all the genetics that underpin . Researchers have pinpointed how years of civil war and poaching in Mozambique have led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks. This story was originally published in the September 2015 issue of National Geographicmagazine. Tongo Tongo shot two elephants one day, she says. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Some elephant populations seem to be missing their tusks. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, Im looking for. Boko Haram also uses the bush as a baseNigerias Sambisa Forest, a game reserve south of Lake Chad. This is a photocopy of the diary of the LRAs Lt. Col. Vincent Binany Okumu, who, defectors say, was in charge of ivory hunting in Garamba National Park. Turkalo is back in the U.S. now, living near Providence, R.I. She had to flee Africa last year because of the civil war in the country that is home to the elephants she shared a life with. Andrea Turkalo looks through a scope in 2002 from the observation platform she built along the edge of the bai. Ugandan forces killed Binany in 2013 and recovered thediary. A small proportion of females . His control is absolute.. This paper is going to lead to a lot of speculation and modeling.. Fifty percent will be tuskless. His army farmed vegetables. I make a mental note that Konys soldiers and other armed groups walk hundreds of miles from Sudan into this endless grass curtain to kill elephants. Their own families are afraid that theyre devils, or forever soldiers, who might kill them in the night. To use comments you will need to have JavaScript enabled. Once the war and poaching ended,elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find . PRODUCER: Janey Adams. Michael Onen, the defector from Konys army, told me that the LRA and the janjaweed had battled over ivory, with one group robbing the other, and that it was the janjaweeds success in trading ivory that originally gave Kony the idea to start killing elephants. hide caption, "We didn't know anything about (the forest elephants) in terms of their social structure, numbers, genetics, communication," Turkalo explained back in 2002 when the NPR team visited. It's called the Dzanga bai a clearing the size of several football fields that's rich in the mineralized mud that the elephants depend on. But ammunition is in perilously short supplynot even enough for basic trainingand the rangers largest weapon, a belt-fed machine gun, tends to jam every third round or so. I agree elephants are my favourite animals and it's unfair elephants don't cut of our noses or massively nearly ruin our species so why should we do the same to them. Soldiers killed elephants to acquire ivory which was later sold to finance arms and ammunition. He was 22 years old the night in 1998 that Konys soldiers raided his village in Gulu, Uganda, and pulled him from his bed. Earlier this year Kony suffered the defection of his commander of operations, Dominic Ongwen, who told African Union forces that Konys desire for ivory was reinforced by Seleka. In the United States, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama supported efforts either to arrest or kill him. Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? But seeing it in front of you, and knowing those individuals are related, that makes my day. As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. The Rhodesian armed forces lacked the manpower to effectively protect its 1,300-kilometre (800 mi) border with Mozambique against entering ZANLA insurgents. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. This is the long shadow of that human imprint that is going to take generations to erase, Pringle says. Villagers sometimes taunt returned children with the same expression used for Konys men: LRA Tongo Tongo. LRA Cut Cuta reference, Sugule explains, to the militants vicious use ofmachetes. PELLETIER: The reason why that's important is because if you stop the killing right now, you know, the time it would take for the population to, you know, restore that traits would be much longer now that there's been a change in the genes than if it wasn't. Chad. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Large-tusked elephants in Gorongosa were killed for their ivory, which was sold to buy arms and ammunition. After Sudanese poachers killed his ranger father, Adoum refused diya, a traditional community payment. Turkalo's pretty famous in the world of elephant research, as one of the first to study forest elephants. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. Beginning on Christmas Eve, his soldiers spread out in small teams and murdered civilians. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. a. percentage of elephants killed only for their meat 19/129 = 14.7% b. percentage of elephants killed only for their tusks 75/129 = 58.1% c. percentage of elephants killed for both their tusks and meat 27/129 = 20.9% 5. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. Being small, he balked at having to carry the heavy bundles that Konys militants ferry from camp to camp in their patrols across central Africa, and for his whining, he was beaten with a machete. It needs to be durable and small enough to fit inside the cavities George Dante would make in the blocks of resin and lead that formed the tusks. Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. Copyright 2021 NPR. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. when will hunters get the message we need other species alive on our planet for our own species to survive . I'm outraged as to how some people have the audacity to kill these inconncent , sentient creatures who , like most animals help keep the food chain stable. Among the recent casualties was a group of rare forest elephants in the Central African Republic. We'll tell you more about them Friday, on NPR's Morning Edition. 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