|
History of
a slaughter
Elephants use
their tusks for stripping trees, moving stuff, fighting and display. But
humans have developed other uses for tusks - or ivory - which,
unfortunately, only works if the elephant is dead: things like jewellery,
piano keys and billiard balls.
Although ivory
has been revered for its lustrous allure for centuries, large-scale
killing of elephants for ivory did not begin until about 1900.
That's when the
"great white hunters" started storming through Africa with
their large-bore elephant guns.
Yet in the
1930s, an estimated 5 to 10 million elephants remained across the
continent. Between 1979 and 1992, their numbers plunged from 1.3 million
to about 600,000.
|
