Word: kenyans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...panelists--paleontologist Richard Leakey, the director of Kenya's Wildlife Services, and Richard Garstang of the Endangered Wildlife Trust of Southern Africa--disagreed over the role of ivory trading. While the Kenyan elephant population is dangerously low, Garstang said, elephant overpopulation in South Africa makes that government's policy of state-run population control and ivory trading an appropriate solution...
...gray Kenyan dusk, an elephant soundlessly advances to the edge of a water hole, its trunk raised high to catch the first scent of danger. Satisfied that the way is clear, it signals and is joined by a second elephant. In ritual greeting the two behemoths entwine their trunks, flap their enormous ears and clack tusk against tusk, sending the cold crack of ivory across the Ngulia Hills. That same sound is heard 10,000 miles away in Hong Kong and Tokyo, where ivory traders stack tusk upon tusk -- more than 800 tons, scrubbed clean of blood and connective tissue...
...Kenya is striking back. In his breast pocket, Woodley has an envelope stuffed with 30,000 Kenyan shillings ($1,428) -- money for informants. The antipoaching units are exchanging their World War I bolt-action rifles for automatic assault weapons. Within the past year the APUs have killed 18 poachers under a shoot-to-kill order. Dozens of senior wildlife-department personnel have been interrogated, and some have been relieved of their duties. These measures seem to be working. In the past month not one fresh carcass has been found. "Everyone is keen as mustard," says Woodley, beaming...
Last week's attack was apparently the latest in a prolonged war between the Kenyan government and heavily armed bands of poachers set on pursuing the illegal trade in ivory, rhinoceros horns and leopard and lion skins. Richard Leakey, the noted paleoanthropologist who directs Kenya's wildlife service, said the killers would probably turn out to be poachers from neighboring Somaliland. These nomads are paid almost nothing for the hacked-off trophies, which are later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars in Asian and Middle Eastern markets...
Sixty tons of firewood and 140 gal. of gasoline were needed to get the great bonfire going. Nothing less would reduce to ashes the 2,400 elephant tusks -- twelve tons of nonflammable ivory in all -- that Kenyan wildlife officials had confiscated from poachers in the past four years...