A poacher's bullet kills more than just an elephant. An elephant's death goes through the whole ecosystem. 2 Because of that, African elephants numbers have dropped by 62% in the last decade. They could be mostly extinct by the end of the next decade. 1 People in Africa are poaching elephants every day for their ivory tusks, bones, and meat. The most popular place to illegally trade ivory is China. Some people say Chinese people like ivory for cultural reasons. The elephant's tusks are made of ivory. It is very expensive on the black market. Both African female and male elephants have tusks. From the outside, you can only see ⅔ of each tusk. The other ⅓ is inside their body attached to things. 4Ivory is the …show more content…
There is a problem. Ninety-six elephants are being poached a day. 1 People are coming up with solutions. One way to discourage poachers, is to dye their tusks. 5 But, there needs to be a low cost and safe way to do this. It costs a lot of money to put every elephant to sleep for how long it takes to dye the tusks. It also takes many people. In order for the dye to work, it must stain all the way through the tusk. More work is needed to improve security, mostly at borders in between countries and at popular locations in the ivory trade. 6 For this to work, it needs more than one country on board, along common ivory routes. Another way to discourage poachers is to burn ivory stockpiles. Ethiopia became the second country to burn stockpiles of ivory. They burned 6.1 tons of ivory in just one day. The ivory that they burned was confiscated from people throughout the last 20 years. 7 There are ways to discourage poachers. We just have to enforce those