(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] There is a war against nature
raging in the Savannahs and jungles
of Africa and Asia in a greedy,
brutal battle over a limited resource.
- It's a war.
And we're losing it.
- [Narrator] Poaching and wildlife trafficking
have reached unprecedented dimensions.
(dramatic music)
- I'll make a special deal for you.
- [Narrator] Ivory and rhino horn
have become lucrative commodities.
- Essentially this is the dark side of globalization.
- [Narrator] Increasingly,
criminal networks and terrorist groups
use wildlife smuggling to fund their activities.
(men shouting) (guns shooting)
- There's many people that have a big interest in
investing in extinction and we have to prevent
those people from wiping those species out.
(elephant trumpets)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] This is Rukinga,
a wildlife sanctuary in southern Kenya.
An elephant was slaughtered five days ago.
Before we can see what has happened here, we can smell it.
Three large bulls were all killed in the same night.
- [Narrator] This area is visited
regularly by gangs of poachers.
- [Narrator] In 1900, 10 million elephants
lived all over Africa.
By 1989 the number dropped to 600,000
Now there are around 470,000 wild elephants left in Africa.
We are facing the greatest mass extinction
since the era of the dinosaurs.
In Kenya alone, 10 elephants are killed
every day, that we know of.
It's believed the total is much higher.
- Elephants really do represent
something about our greatness.
They are such a magnificent species.
Losing them is something that very few people could imagine.
We take it for granted that they will always be there.
The fact that elephants are being poached
at such a rapid rate, is a surprise to many, many people.
- [Narrator] An average of 33,000 elephants
are killed each year in Africa for their ivory.
That's one every 15 minutes.
Here in Cameroon, 400 hundred elephants
were killed in one night.
A band of Janjaweed rebels
from Sudan slaughtered these animals using
AK-47s and hand grenades.
Central Africa has lost 65%
of its elephant population in the last decade.
Forest elephants are on the brink of extinction.
If poaching continues at this pace,
elephants could be gone from the wild
in less than 15 years.
Kruger National Park is the biggest
wildlife reserve in South Africa.
Home to the largest rhino population on earth.
Park rangers and forensics experts
are going out to inspect a kill.
A white rhino has been hacked to death for his horn.
The rangers claim by poachers from Mozambique.
- [Kobus] The front horn would be here, the back horn here.
So they went in deep into the skull.
- [Narrator] The rhino has gunshot wounds.
It's very likely the animal was still alive
when the poachers took his horn.
(flies buzzing)
- What the people also did at the back,
they started to open it for the vultures
and those to come in,
to move into the carcass.
To destroy evidence.
- [Narrator] Kruger National Park is a vast area,
almost as big as Israel and hard to control.
Between one and two rhinos are killed here every day.
Poaching has hit a crisis point.
Until 2007, fewer than 50 rhinos per year were poached.
Since then the numbers have exploded.
In 2013, over 1000.
(gun shoots)
(men chattering)
(rhino screeching)
The numbers continue to rise.
This has led the park authorities to take drastic measures.
Rhinos are being relocated from
the Kruger Park to safer areas,
further away from the Mozambican border.
There's a ring of private reserves around the park.
Like Kruger, Manyeleti is being hit hard by poachers.
Loot Schultz runs a small bush camp in Manyeleti Reserve.
- It's escalating on a monthly basis.
If you look at the figures,
it goes up 50 to 70% every month, rhino deaths,
and we don't seem to get to grips with it.
It's a war.
And we're losing it.
That's the bottom line.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The Manyeleti rangers are constantly
on the look out for poachers.
It's not long until we find the remains
of a female white rhino.
- These were amateurs.
They damaged the whole horn.
You see there, where they hacked it here?
If you get professionals, they take it off cleanly.
Really often what happens is they cut it so deep,
it impairs the breathing of the rhino.
Then he might still be alive and impairs the breathing
and he smothers to death, can't breathe anymore.
It's a bad thing.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The fence is checked for signs of poachers.
- You see the poaching spot there?
They went out from here.
You see where they put their footsteps there?
- [Narrator] The rangers' job has become
increasingly dangerous.
We are at a spot where the rangers had
a firefight with poachers, just a couple of weeks ago.
- [Narrator] Our question whether he regrets
having killed the poacher seems rather strange to Sam.
(Sam laughs)
- For these people that do the poaching,
the rhino means nothing to them.
It gives them no pleasure, it gives them no benefit,
it gives them nothing.
They just see it, it's just an animal,
it's a white man's toy.
But if I take that horn from that rhino,
I can buy myself a cell phone,
I can buy myself a motor car,
I can buy some presents for my girlfriend.
That's what's important.
- [Narrator] Johannesburg investigative journalist
Julian Rademeyer has made it his mission
to expose illegal trade in rhino horn.
- Suddenly you begin to see this uptake from 2003 onwards
and all of that seems to be traced back to Vietnam.
- [Narrator] One of the reasons for the spike
is that South Africa is one of the few
countries in the world where you can
still get a permit to trophy hunt.
- You begin to see Vietnamese names
cropping up and again and again and initially
it's a small blip and then by 2008, 2009,
it really picks up and by the end of 2009, 2010,
the Vietnamese hunters dominate
the trade in rhino horn trophies.
So you have dozens and eventually hundreds
of horns going out from South Africa as trophies,
arriving in Vietnam, not being declared
to Vietnamese customs and just vanishing.
Two years ago, the Vietnamese government went
and did a snap survey of some
of the hunters that had shot rhinos
in South Africa and taken the trophies out.
Very few of them still had the trophies.
You know, these were not trophy hunters,
these were people coming in under the guise
of trophy hunting to try
and get as much rhino horn as possible.
- [Narrator] After decades of isolation,
Vietnam opened its economic doors to the world
and has since experienced an unprecedented boom
in prosperity and population.
It has also become ground zero
for the illegal international trade in rhino horn.
Rhino horn was traditionally used
to treat fever or headaches.
Now it is being touted as a miracle cure for fatal diseases.
- There was a myth that started doing the rounds
in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City about an army general.
It's sometimes said, sometimes a senior politician,
sometimes a former prime minister,
he was cured of cancer by using rhino horn.
- [Narrator] Do Hoang is a well-known journalist in Vietnam.
He has investigated the illegal trade in rhino horn
and says demand and prices are skyrocketing.
- [Narrator] Hoang promises to try
to arrange a meeting with a rhino horn user.
Days later Do Hoai, who sells telecommunication devices,
agrees to meet us at his house.
Hoai claims to have inherited the piece from his father.
Owning rhino horn is not illegal in Vietnam.
Trading it, is.
- [Narrator] Hoai admits that he also
uses the rhino horn for himself and for friends.
(speaking foreign language)
- [Narrator] Hoai's father had cancer,
they believed drinking rhino horned prolonged his life.
- [Narrator] But numerous studies have proven that rhino
has no curative qualities.
Essentially, it's the same material
as your own fingernails, keratin.
(speaking foreign language)
- [Narrator] There has been an international ban
on trading rhino horn for the past 30 years.
And yet consumers still manage to get hold of it.
We send in an experienced undercover
investigator posing as a wealthy Chinese buyer.
She heads for Hanoi's medical street.
Rhino horn used to be sold openly here.
(speaking foreign language)
- [Narrator] Succumbing to international pressure though,
authorities have been cracking down on illegal traders,
making shopkeepers very wary.
The investigator tries another shop.
Here she makes some headway.
The owner says that he could get
a rhino horn from Singapore.
Our investigator moves on.
Finally she gets lucky.
- When we visit a store and the store owner says
"Oh, we have, just have a guy who come in and out
"quite frequently, bring the stuff to us."
So we ask him, can you arrange us to meet
this person because we want to see
if there's availability on rhino horn.
- [Narrator] Three days later, she gets a call
and arranges to meet back at his shop.
She is asked to wait outside.
Obviously she's being checked out.
- [Investigator] We arrived and this dealer
guy came over to the store.
We meet in the back of the store
and he told us how they changed the color
so they can get past the customs
and bring it into the country.
- [Narrator] Making the horn look like wood
is a common trick used by smugglers.
The weight of both pieces is nearly 500 grams,
that's worth approximately 25,000 US Dollars.
The dealer believes our investigator
is a serious buyer so he fetches a catalog,
full of illegal wildlife products,
worth millions of dollars.
- I think he's part of the big network
and all these things are very expensive at this moment
in the market and he took such a great risk
so he play quite an important role in this group,
and I think the group has access to smuggling
directly from both Asia and Africa.
- [Narrator] At 50,000 US dollars per kilo,
it would seem to be a commodity only for the super rich.
However, according to our undercover
investigator that is not so.
She was told this story by a shop owner
whose mother was interested in selling
a small piece of rhino horn she had acquired.
- [Investigator] She just say her mother
be invited to this party.
Everyone put in like 2,000 dollars,
and when there is a rhino horn available,
and they would inviting everyone to the party.
So in front of everybody's very eyes,
and they cut the rhino horn to pieces,
to give it to everyone.
- [Narrator] These buying parties are providing
affordable prices and thus wider
access to the illegal trade.
(suspenseful music)
Poaching has spread all over Africa.
Despite thousands of poachers having been killed,
the profits keep luring them in.
In this area of Northern Kenya,
constant patrols are made by this special
ranger anti-poaching unit.
This remote area is traditionally troubled
by tribal conflict, drought and poaching.
The border with Somalia is not far away.
One of these rangers used to be a poacher himself.
Two years ago Lotak changed sides.
He claims to have killed 150 elephants.
- [Narrator] Lotak used to be the leader of the group.
His job was to shoot the elephant.
The others had to remove the tusks.
- [Narrator] 15,000 Kenyan shilling is about
160 US dollars for a kilo of ivory.
Since Lotak dropped out, that price gone up to 500 dollars.
The value of a single tusk is worth 10 times
the average annual income in some African countries.
- So long as the price of ivory continues to rise,
then the incentive for those people in rural areas
to poach elephants will remain high.
- [Narrator] Poachers like Lotak
don't have to search long for buyers.
Thanks to globalization and investments in roads
and infrastructure by foreign nationals,
once isolated regions in Africa
have become easily accessible.
- We see Chinese people in Africa
who come over for construction work,
working on roads and buildings and bridges
and they go back to China with just one tusk.
You know, three kilos.
And in Africa it might cost them $100.
And they know that when they get
to China it's already worth, you know,
$6,000 and if they hang on to that tusk
for another two years, it could be worth $12,000.
- [Narrator] The highway between Nairobi and Mombasa
is one of the major arteries of Eastern Africa.
It is a well-known route for trafficking networks,
shifting contraband into this busy port.
Numerous studies indicate that poachers
rarely operate on their own anymore.
Organized crime, attracted by the huge profit margins
in wildlife trafficking, has taken over.
About 2,500 containers are being shipped in and out
of here each day to destinations all over the world.
Many contain illegal wildlife products.
In Kenyan ports like Mombasa,
large shipments totalling nearly 10 tons
of ivory were confiscated last year alone.
But the confiscated ivory is only the tip of the iceberg.
Interpol estimates the actual amount
of smuggled ivory to be 10 times higher.
More than half of all seized ivory loads
were destined for China.
China's 1.3 billion citizens have experienced
an unequaled economic rise in the last decade.
Guangzhou is the boomtown of China.
The city of 12 million has the country's highest
per capita number of millionaires and multimillionaires.
Guangzhou has a long tradition of trading ivory.
Today the demand comes from the newly rich
who want to show off their wealth.
After the global economic crisis in 2008,
many rich Chinese decided to invest heavily
in more traditional things,
things like artwork and wildlife products.
Ivory and rhino horn have become
popular investment instruments.
After months of investigation,
we finally meet one of the buyers.
Frank An curates the art collection
of one of the new rich in Chinese society.
He likes to spend it on beautiful things.
- It's the old ivory.
It's done in Beijing from the master.
The lotus is a kind of symbol in Buddhism
because it grow up from the mud under the water,
that when it comes out, it very clean,
it's very purifying.
- [Narrator] This collection is worth millions of dollars.
- [Frank] It's the rhino's horn.
- Yeah, how would you drink it?
Oh, okay. - Like this.
It's for drinking.
The head of the tribes, what we need to show off
to other competitors, I'm powerful.
Why people want to marry a beautiful woman
but not an ugly girl?
It's a trophy also.
People always kill those dangerous animals.
They never feel proud to kill a chicken.
We are very lucky.
Our ancestors wins in the long trip.
If you win, you take everything.
So we have the right to do something unfair to the animals.
- [Narrator] Mr An's views may be offensive to many
but he is acting perfectly legally.
The Chinese government controls the legal trade
in ivory from stockpiles it owns.
All ivory products should come with
an ID card confirming the legal origin.
The government also runs and supplies
the commercial carving industry.
37 industrialized carving factories share
the five tons dispersed by the authorities each year.
78-year-old Pan Chuju is the master
carver at Daixin factory.
- [Narrator] He's worried that
ivory will be completely banned.
- [Narrator] In fact, there was a prohibition
of ivory products 25 years ago.
In 1989, after a dramatic rise in poaching,
all international trade in ivory trade was banned.
The effect was striking.
- When the ivory trade was banned,
the price of ivory collapsed from about $200 per kilogram
down to, I don't know, about $50 per kilogram.
And poaching more or less disappeared all across Africa.
- [Narrator] Elephant populations immediately recovered.
But then Japan and later China were granted
singular purchases of ivory from the stockpiles
of several African countries.
150 tons of ivory flooded on to the market.
The appetite for ivory was revived
and the carving industry flourished again.
But this time it was different.
- In the old days it would take several masters
a few years to carve one you know, elaborate carving,
but today in the carving factories it's dental drills.
People use dental drills.
This type of industrialization of ivory carving,
this is what's going to kill elephants.
- [Narrator] Carving factories claim that all
of their ivory is legal,
but if the government only supplies five tons a year,
the numbers just don't add up.
- If it's equally distributed among 37 carving factories,
each carving factory gets a couple of hundred kilograms.
And if you look at the size and the skill,
how many people working in the carving factory,
you'll figure out that, you know,
how much this carving factory had to use illegal ivory.
- [Narrator] Again we rig our investigator
with a hidden camera and send her out to speak with carvers
to find out where they're getting their ivory.
Her target area is a mall in Guangzhou,
well known for its ivory retailers.
As cover, the investigator tells the shop owners
that she has a piece she'd like to have carved.
Finally a carver agrees to see her at his home.
The carver has learned his craft
from a master carver in Hong Kong.
Now he has 20 apprentices in his workshop.
His business is approved by the government.
The investigator manages to win his trust.
He is proud of his craft and frankly admits
that he specializes in making fake antiques.
- [Narrator] The carver also says that
controls on these products are tight,
but he knows people in Fujian province
who traffic illegal ivory and rhino horn.
- [Narrator] Our investigator also asks
about carved rhino horn.
- [Narrator] It is estimated that 90% ivory
trade in China is illegal.
The legal trade however, provides the perfect cover.
- So currently China allows five tons of ivory
to be sold legally every year.
The government's estimate for demand is 200 tons a year.
So this isn't meeting the supply,
it's not meeting that demand,
but what it's doing is it's giving
the public a very confused message.
Nobody knows what's legal, nobody knows what's illegal.
And the big thing we found previously was that the traders
use the legal trade to launder illegal ivory.
- [Narrator] The Forestry Police
are charged with the increasingly
impossible task of controlling the illegal market.
We have the rare opportunity to film a raid with them.
This is a market in Beijing.
Many wildlife products are sold and bought here.
But it is small pickings by any
standard of the illegal trade.
- [Narrator] This dealer tries to explain his products
are carved from mammoth, not ivory.
But the officers don't believe him.
The dealer shows his ID cards to the police officers.
They confiscate his goods
and take him in for further questioning.
But he was telling the truth and was later released.
This woman also claimed to sell mammoth ivory.
But the texture of the material tells the officer otherwise.
- It also makes it very difficult to enforce.
Forestry police and customs officers sometimes complain
that the system makes it very difficult for them to
distinguish what's illegal and what's legal.
- [Narrator] This small shopkeeper was later
charged with selling illegal ivory
and now faces five to 10 years in jail.
The overwhelming amount of carved ivory
for sale in shops or markets,
whether illegal or not, is still only a fraction
of the vast amount of raw ivory estimated
to reach China week after week.
- If literally, 10s and 10s of tons of ivory
is reaching China, where is it going?
Those tusks are going somewhere in either China
or neighboring countries and they're just sitting there
and they're waiting for the time
when they will be worth literally a fortune.
- Where it's going is to people that are investing
in the extinction of Africa's elephants
and they think that's a very smart investment,
because they believe there'll never be any more elephants
or any more rhinos than there are now.
Which will mean their investments will increase in value.
- [Narrator] The grim realty is that elephants
and rhinos are trapped in a deadly spiral
driven by the merciless laws of the free market.
Wildlife trade has become big business for organized crime.
Only they can provide the money
and logistics to shift hundreds
and thousands of tons of contraband around the globe.
(dramatic music)
- Some of the networks that exist are highly specialized.
But there are, you know, existing, well established,
long established criminal networks and groups
that simply turn to a particular activity
because it is profitable.
- [Narrator] In fact, after the trade in drugs and weapons,
wildlife trafficking has become
the most lucrative black-market business.
It's estimated to be worth 20 billion dollars annually.
- Wildlife crime is the attractive one,
because the risks of getting caught are pretty small.
And then if you do get caught,
then in many countries in the world,
the penalty is going to be small.
But the profits, depending on what you're dealing in,
you're gonna get more from them
than you are smuggling cocaine or heroin.
- [Narrator] Low risks and high profits.
It's no surprise then that wildlife trafficking has
caught the attention of other groups as well.
African rebel groups including Uganda's Lords Resistance
Army are known to finance their activities
in part by trafficking ivory.
- [Narrator] Somalia's al Shabaab militia
also dabbles in ivory trafficking,
especially in neighboring Kenya.
- Al Shabaab definitely plays a role in the ivory trade.
We know certainly that Al Shabaab taxes elephant ivory
that comes across the border into Somalia,
and then goes into Somali ports,
Mogadishu, Kishmaayo, and Barawa.
(soldiers chanting) (guns shooting)
- [Narrator] Ivory profits are said to fund
as much as 40% of Al Shabaab's activities.
If true that means that during
its attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall two years ago,
27 of the 67 people killed,
were killed by blood ivory money.
- If I'm a rebel, if I'm a terrorist,
and I'm located in Eastern Africa or Central Africa,
and I look around me and I say right,
I need money to go out and buy more AK‐47s,
or to buy Semtex or whatever.
It's not long before my focus is gonna drop
upon this large creature with big gray ears
and these two white things that stick
out the front of his face,
which apparently people in Asia
are willing to pay a lot of money for.
- [Narrator] It's not only criminal cartels,
terrorist groups and rebel militia that
are making millions from wildlife trafficking.
Kenya is fourth on the worldwide corruption ladder.
- There is no way a container load of ivory can pass through
Kenya's international border with Uganda,
come down the Kenyan highways and reach the port of Mombasa
and get onto a ship and go to China.
It cannot happen unless there is corruption
down that entire chain.
The people who are at the highest level of these cartels
in Kenya are very well connected,
politically, economically, with the police,
maybe with the customs authorities or the ports authorities.
And so they are probably involved
in many other illicit activities.
It's not just ivory.
Ivory's just one of the things that they're doing.
And so they have people who protect them.
- [Narrator] Worldwide, many poachers and smaller dealers
have been arrested.
- We're picking off the small fry,
we're not getting the big fish.
That's because we're not taking the time to try
and identify who the big fish are.
If you think of the number of specific agencies,
or police customs officials,
drug squads that are dedicated every day
to try to combat drug trafficking
around the world, you know,
the numbers must run into the 10s,
if not hundreds of thousands.
How many officers around the world are dedicated to try
to combat or identify wildlife traffickers?
Very, very few.
- We're not dealing with dismantling the networks
on an international level.
And even international agencies like Interpol, like CITES,
they don't have the powers to deal with that.
Interpol is reliant on local police in Interpol offices
in the countries where they're based.
And time and time again any efforts they make to crack
down on crime bosses in places like Vietnam get scuppered
because of leaks from the police force.
- [Narrator] It's journalist Julian Rademeyer,
who has succeeded where organizations
like Interpol have so far failed,
dismantling a major trafficking network.
This video, obtained by Rademeyer,
was shot by Chumlong Lemthongthai, a Thai national,
who was identified as a major setup-man
for an illegal Vietnamese trophy hunter.
- Eventually you had criminal syndicates with links
to Laos who were trying to line up hunters
to take part in legal hunts and they found a pliant
South African game farm owner and hunting outfitter
and they then went around to brothels
and strip clubs around Johannesburg
and Pretoria and started recruiting young women who'd been
trafficked to South Africa to work in the sex trade,
young Thai women, and suddenly you have large numbers
of Vietnamese and Thai women shooting rhinos.
- [Narrator] Lemthongthai is now serving
a 30-year sentence in a South African jail.
Rademeyer also traced him back to his client.
- He was the lieutenant for the so‐called kingpin,
a man called Vixay Keosavang.
The U.S. State Department has put
a one million dollar bounty for Keosavang's arrest.
But he's still in business
and completely and utterly untouchable.
The Laotian government won't touch him.
No‐one else has ever been able to nail him.
(rhinos bellowing)
- [Narrator] In South Africa,
rhino farmers are lobbying hard
for the legalization of the rhino horn trade.
This property belongs to one of the biggest
rhino farmers in South Africa.
John Hume, who made a fortune in tourism,
turned to breeding rhinos.
He has over 1,000 on his farms.
Not surprisingly he is one of the
strongest advocates for legalization.
To protect his herd he employs a private ranger army,
still poachers find their way in.
- She was a young cow, pregnant,
but all of her breeding life still ahead of her.
And when you lose an adult female like this,
it's devastating for the species into the future.
It's exactly what we don't want,
and it's exactly what our policies are creating.
- [Narrator] In John Hume's view,
animal conservationists who oppose a legalization
of trade are as bad as poachers.
- They may as well be pulling the trigger themselves,
because the anti-traders are stopping
us fighting this effectively.
Therefore, they are just the same as the poachers.
They're the killers of my rhino.
- [Narrator] Although Hume's black
and white rhinos roam in a vast area,
they are being partially domesticated
with medical care and additional feeding.
Hume considers himself not only a businessman,
but also a conservationist.
- Unfortunately, I am labeled as being
in it only for the money.
But I breed rhinos and if I were to make money out
of breeding rhinos, which I do not,
but if I was selling the horn
and I was to make money out of breeding rhinos,
there will be hundreds of other people
who want to breed rhinos.
- [Narrator] To protect his rhinos,
Hume regularly de-horns them.
But he doesn't destroy the pieces.
He stores them in a high security vault.
- The legalization of trade will not
stop the poaching as such.
But at the moment we've closed our doors.
We have said to the demand,
never mind what you want to call them,
syndicates, users, whatever.
We've said to the demand,
"We will not sell you one kilo of rhino horn,
"not one, go away."
So what do they do?
They say, "Okay, we'll go away, we'll deal with a poacher."
Now if you have legalization,
then that'll be different.
At least we will compete against the poacher.
So to me it's really, it's a stupid thing and it's similar
to the bootlegging we had in America.
The banning of booze in America
only made certain people rich,
and it didn't work, as we know.
It didn't work.
- [Narrator] However, most wildlife trade experts agree,
there is no sound economic model for legalization
and that it is simply too much of a risk to test it.
- You know there's 1.3 billion Chinese.
10% of them are now middle class.
Now a hundred million people now want rhino horns.
How the hell are you going to supply the demand
for 100 million people?
You have, you don't have enough rhinos to breed
fast enough to supply all those rhino horns.
Not in a million years can you meet that demand.
Never, ever.
They live in coo coo world if they think
they're going to by supplying the demand,
they're going to stop rhino poaching.
- That experiment has been done and that experiment failed.
So why on earth would we take a risk with an animal,
which is on the brink of extinction?
Why would we take that risk?
So that what, a few people can make some money?
It doesn't make sense, any sense whatsoever.
- [Narrator] Flooding the market with illegal wildlife
products is no option for most conservationists.
Instead they are turning to consumers with a strong
message to be part of the solution, not the problem.
Chinese celebrities like actor Jackie Chan
are raising their voices in an effort to change
the hearts and minds of their countrymen
and stop them buying wildlife products.
- If you're buying rhino horn,
you may be paying for more than just horn.
You're paying for guns, (gun shoots) bullets,
poisoned arrows, and chainsaws,
axes and machetes to hack off the face of the rhino.
And you are paying for the life of a beautiful creature.
So please tell your friends and relatives.
Never buy products made from rhino horn.
When the buying stops, the killing can too.
- Well there are definitely some people
out there whose interest is purely commercial
and they're looking to effectively invest in extinction.
They're looking to get the value of this product.
I think that's, that's some people.
But there are other people who are buying
these products out of ignorance.
People have to understand that their action
of purchasing this prize is actually driving the poaching.
I think most of them dissociate themselves from the killing
of the animals and I think that's the connection
that needs to be made to persuade people,
it's not a good thing to buy ivory.
- [Narrator] Non-profit groups working
in China know that when people have information, they care.
So it is particularly important to communicate that
elephants actually have to be killed to get the tusks.
Since the Chinese word for ivory is tooth,
many Chinese still believe that tusks fall out naturally.
- We will never change things in China, for example,
but the Chinese can change it
if they have the right information.
- [Narrator] Changing the minds of consumers is crucial
but the tide cannot change fast enough.
Conservationists agree that what is needed now
to send a clear message to consumers,
is to immediately ban all trade,
in all endangered wildlife, worldwide.
Surveys indicate that this strategy could be successful,
especially in China where people look
to their leaders for moral guidance.
- We asked previous ivory buyers,
what would make you not buy ivory in the future?
The answer that got the most points, 60%,
was for a government to ban,
to make ivory buying illegal in all circumstances.
(ivory crunching)
- [Narrator] Years of campaigning are taking effect.
10 countries have destroyed their ivory stockpiles
in a stand against illegal ivory trade.
Last year the United States and even Hong Kong
and China joined in.
- Destruction of ivory is telling people,
ivory consumption is immoral.
And this is something that we really need
to build in consumers everywhere.
There are things that money shouldn't buy.
- [Narrator] Changing the minds of consumers
and pressing governments to take action is crucial
in the race to save these iconic animals.
But what has become increasingly evident is that
it is just as important to engage the people
in the places where poaching is happening.
Many poachers are still being recruited
from villages around the wildlife reserves.
- The communities that live with this wildlife
are not supported adequately in this country,
so that it makes sense for them to protect that wildlife.
- [Narrator] Changing the economic conditions in villages
around wildlife reserves would make a big difference.
- At the moment, conservation is seen as a white man's game.
There's only one way to deal with the problem,
you've got to get the community on your side.
And believe me, nobody comes into any of these villages,
what we call front line villages, nobody.
Not a strange car, not a strange people will drive
down the streets of a village without not being recognized.
- [Narrator] The Northern Rangeland Trust
in northern Kenya was set up to do just that.
The idea is to enable communities to profit
from animal conservation and make protection
more attractive to them than poaching.
The 9-1 anti-poaching unit is a part of this new concept.
It's made up of members of different tribes.
So they have the co-operation of all
the communities in this large area.
They have informants who tell them
immediately about suspicious activities.
(people chattering)
And the villagers seem to appreciate
the presence of the 9-1 team.
- [Narrator] The concept of community conservation is making
a big difference in this part of Northern Kenya.
Poaching has dropped by a third
and locals now know that protecting
animals brings tourists into the community lands.
And tourists bring money.
It was the influence and pressure from his community
that finally made Lotak change sides.
(soft music)
- [Narrator] Community conservation is a model
that is slowly beginning to take hold
in other parts of Africa as well.
Millions of years of evolution are coming
to an end as elephants and rhino continue
to disappear at breath-taking speed.
- Rhino poaching will end the day when
there's no rhinos left, finished.
Or the day it's made so difficult
for the poacher to come in here,
that it's impossible to poach a rhino.
And that's we must do.
- [Narrator] Extinction is no longer
a by-product of poaching, it has become its very purpose.
- If we don't nip this in the bud,
we will lose all of our rhinos within 10 years, I believe.
We will lose almost all of our
wild elephants within 10 years.
- [Narrator] Poaching is an international crime.
It will take a concerted international response to stop it.
- I think when we lose these animals,
we lose part of our humanity.
What are we leaving for our children and grandchildren?
We're leaving a really impoverished world environmentally.
Which means we've basically sold all the family jewels.
So their inheritance is gonna be squandered
if we don't take care of it now.
- [Narrator] We know from experience that only when
the demand stops, so will the killing.
- The world has two choices, we can have elephants.
Or we can have ivory trade.
We can't have both.
(soft instrumental music)