Kony and his Elephant Poaching

     A recent article written by Brian Christy, tells his story of attempting to catch ivory poachers. He asks taxidermist, Dante to create a lifelike ivory tusk with a gps tracking system inside. If he could do this, he would be asked to create more. In the criminal poacher world, Ivory works as currency. This is why Brian has asked him to make this counterfeit currency he can track. The purpose of these tusks is to find out where these illegal items are taken. Brian wanted to find out what ports it leaves, what ships it travels on, what cities and countries it visits, and where it ends up.
     Ivory poachers will run a lighter underneath it or scratch it to see if it is legit. A real ivory tusk wont melt and it won't scratch. Dante has to pay attention to this, along with creating the lines at the end of the tusk that resemble the circles in a tree. About, 30,000 elephants are slaughtered every year for their tusks. The Chinese middle class is number one buyer in ivory. Most illegal ivory goes to China where a pair of Ivory chopsticks could see for thousands of dollars and Ivory carved tusks can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
     East Africa is number one for elephant poaching, In June the government announced they had lost 6o percent of it's elephant population. In the past five years the population went from 110,00 too 48,000. Poor villages and unpaid park rangers hunt them for cash. Poachers are enslaving people, taking over villages and killing anyone who gets in their way. “Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony,” says the U.S. State Department’s Marty Regan.
     If you don't know who Kony is, he is one of the biggest African terrorists. His number one goal is to overthrow the Ugandan government. Kony's minions have killed over 10,000 people, doing inhumane and unthinkable acts of violence to these innocent families. He has kidnapped thousands of young boys and have trained them to be killers. Kony tends to set up camp where elephants are plentiful. One of the former sex slaves ws interviewed by Brian Christy and she said "They say the more elephants to kill the more money to be made".
     This is where the artificial tusks come in, to track where it goes and hopefully into the hands of one of Kony's men.

In May 2013 poachers with the insurgent group Seleka massacred 26 elephants at Dzanga Bai, a mineral-rich watering hole in CAR.