World Elephant Day, with Hope
Today is World Elephant Day. We commemorate our huge friends. They have shared the planet with us since humans emerged from the Great Rift. While we crept along, slowly evolving, elephants carried on with the wisdom and beauty of their own lives. They built nurturing and enduring families. They enjoyed their friends and acquaintances, competed and outwitted their rivals. Elephants’ strength and architectural acuity transformed scrubland into savannas, mudflats into water holes. Where they traveled, new opportunities followed. Elephants remain to this day the stewards and anchors of every biome they call home.
Elephants inspired poetry and wonder in us. They also inspired our insatiable greed. We alone are the instruments of elephants’ servitude in circuses and zoos, slaughter by trophy hunting and lust for their ivory. We alone are the instruments of their looming extinction.
The cause of their crisis is undeniable; the solution to their crisis obvious. They are one in the same: they are us.
While we dare not deny our culpability, it is more important that we dedicate ourselves to a new course of action, one calculated to champion their right to live and flourish on Earth as long as we share the planet with them.
This was written by Lisa Kane, JD.
Please join us in showing your enthusiastic support to organizations fighting in Asia and Africa for great arcs of space and freedom where elephants can live out the many decades of their lives with dignity. Here are some organizations that do outstanding work in the field to save wild elephants:
Big Life
The Amboseli Trust for Elephants
Wildlife Trust of India
Here are some petitions to sign:
Tell the US Fish and Wildlife Service to adopt strong protections to stop the ivory trade
Upgrade the Endangered Species Act
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