More: Bangkok, Thailand is hosting the CITES conference and Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra used the international forum to announce that Thailand will start a legislative process to end ivory trade in her country. WWF credited the move to 1.5 million supporters (including Leonardo DiCaprio and US Person) who signed a petition to ask the Thai government to ban the legal trade in ivory. Currently the country is the world's largest unregulated ivory market in the world and serves both as an end user and transshipper of ivory products. Thailand allows trade in ivory from domesticated Asia elephants, but conservationists say the legal trade provides cover for traffickers in illegal ivory. Without effective, consistent enforcement bans on trading ivory will not save elephants and rhinos from extinction in the wild. It is an urgent crisis, so political leaders need to follow up their pledges with swift action. In her welcoming speech on Monday, Minister Shinawatra recognized her country's elephant culture and the established scientific fact that elephants are sentient beings with complex emotional lives. She said elephants deserve more caring treatment from humans. Indeed!
{31.2.13}This World Wildlife Fund video shows the tragic business of wildlife trafficking which unsurprisingly is connected to insurrectionist activity in Africa. The Empire already has a substantial military presence in Africa with special ops forces and advisors fighting insurrectionists threatening sources of valuable commoditites. It is time those assets were turned against wildlife poachers, a real embodiment of evil.