Extinction. Thanks to poaching, that鈥檚 the threat facing India鈥檚 elephants. They could be wiped out within a decade, says ecologist Vivek Menon, founder of the Wildlife Trust of India, based in New Delhi. What鈥檚 ironic is that Menon leads the fight against wildlife crime in a country that ought to be overflowing with elephants. Why? Because Hindus revere them as gods, and stampeding elephants are allowed to crush villages because locals won鈥檛 shoot them. Yet India has turned into an ivory poacher鈥檚 paradise. Michael Bond asked Menon how that has happened.
There are 27,000 elephants in India, which sounds a lot. Why are you worried about them?
You could say all is well with the elephant compared with the tiger, of which there are only 3000 to 4000. But only male Asian elephants have tusks. And there are only about 1500 adult tuskers in India.
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So who is poaching them?
The actual poaching is done by ordinary people. A billion people live alongside 27,000 elephants and there is competition for space. More than a hundred people every year are trampled by elephants. There is a bit of a tense relationship between humans and elephants, so it becomes easy for organised traders to induce a local person to kill an elephant for money.
How do you kill an elephant?
It is not like shooting any other animal. You need a powerful rifle, but they are not widely available in India so people use their ingenuity. To penetrate an elephant鈥檚 skin and bones you need to fire large pieces of steel. To make a big enough gun, people take a large steel pipe from, say, the steering rod of a jeep, and fix it to something that can take the recoil. They use crude gunpowder to fire it. Elephants are creatures of habit, so you simply jam the gun in the fork of a tree and wait for the elephant to come. Very crude, but very effective.
If there were no poaching, wouldn鈥檛 people still kill elephants because of the damage they do to property?
You have to understand that the elephant is a god in India. Ganesh is the Hindu elephant-god who removes all obstacles in life. I have been in situations where elephants have trampled dozens of houses and people have lost their belongings. They are very angry and are throwing stones at the elephants. But each time they throw a stone they cry: 鈥淗ail to you, oh elephant-god.鈥� So these conflicts are not as serious as they might be. People will only kill an elephant if they are really pushed. The real problem is the organised ivory trade, which is taking a considerable percentage of our elephants.
So how do you deal with ivory smugglers?
You cannot 鈥渞ehabilitate鈥� a smuggler like you sometimes can a local poacher. They are generally not exclusively ivory smugglers. They might smuggle drugs, women and arms as well. It can be very crude. In north-eastern India I have seen open barter: ivory traded for a woman, or a woman for arms. For these people enforcement is required, for example, through CITES, the UN convention on wildlife trade.
Won鈥檛 there always be a market for ivory?
Most of the ivory goes to Japan to make name seals, anklets, beads, necklaces-that sort of thing. When you鈥檙e trying to preserve an animal like the rhino, where the horn goes into traditional medicines, there is always the argument that it is a necessity. But ivory is not a necessity. It is critical to understand this. When people sign a cheque in Japan, do they still need to kill an elephant to do it? I understand the concept of tradition, but traditions become outmoded. In India we used to burn our widows. We need to explain to people that ivory is one tradition they can leave behind.
How much success have you had against the smugglers?
We have had 20 or 30 cases where criminals were convicted. One of these people was probably single-handedly responsible for the near extinction of the Indian tiger. We are also helping to change the system. We applied a lot of pressure to ensure that a very senior state conservation official didn鈥檛 get an extension to his job because he was actively involved in poaching.
How dangerous is your work?
I have been on two different hit lists, I have had death threats, and I鈥檝e been shot at.
Do most Indians think wildlife protection is important?
Most people do not have the time to think about wildlife problems, or cannot afford to. But the conservation ethic runs very deep in India. If you ask people what they have done to help save the tiger, most will probably say very little-they have been too busy earning their bread. But ask people if they want to save the tiger, and the majority will say yes. Conservation touches a spiritual and philosophical nerve. There is a philosophy in India of wanting to preserve other life without necessarily attaching a monetary value to it.
The idea that you should preserve wildlife because of its monetary value to the economy drives conservation in southern Africa. What about India?
We differ dramatically from the southern Africans in this. Our philosophy, our ethics, do not allow for consumptive use. On a small scale, a few tribes may want to hunt a few animals for meat, but you don鈥檛 need a conservation programme for that. The concept of making money from the culling of wildlife is deeply disturbing.
Why?
It is disturbing philosophically-I say that both as an Indian and as an Asian. In India it is illegal to kill any wild animal apart from a rat, a mouse or a crow. It is also disturbing ecologically, because the sale of ivory does not work. There is no way you can make money out of a species like the Asian elephant-with only 45,000 to 50,000 in the world-and allow the species to survive. Economically, too, it doesn鈥檛 make sense. If you were to cull all of India鈥檚 elephants, you would earn a pittance from the ivory compared with what the Indian government puts into protecting elephants.
A country like Zimbabwe wants to sell ivory to help pay for conservation, because it claims to have too many elephants? Can you blame them?
I have seen scientific papers from southern Africa claiming that once the population density gets beyond a certain point, people do not tolerate an elephant colony of any size. This kind of thinking is hugely dangerous. The real issue is people鈥檚 attitudes to elephants. In Zimbabwe they are talking about 1.6 elephants per square kilometre. Well, there are places in India, where people live, which have four elephants per square kilometre. I don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 the number of people or the number of elephants that matters. I don鈥檛 want to pass judgment on any other country, but tolerance levels in India are high. While I have sympathy for people who suffer crop damage, I don鈥檛 see culling as a way out. And even if culling has to happen because of a country鈥檚 particular circumstances, I still don鈥檛 see that as a reason for an international trade in ivory.
Do you think your point of view has been ignored in the global debate on conservation?
During the CITES conference in 1997 I was taken aback to hear President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe say in the opening address that every species must pay for itself. Coming from the head of a nation, I thought this was dangerous, and it was even more dangerous because he put it as a Third World and developing country view. I come from the Third World and a developing country, and it鈥檚 not my point of view. Over the past three years I have asked eminent philosophers and wildlife thinkers in 20 Asian countries about preserving wildlife. Not one of them said that a species must pay for itself.
There was a limited resumption of the ivory trade between southern African countries and Japan in 1997. Did that affect elephant poaching in India?
It is difficult to make the link but I am convinced it had an effect: 1997 was the worst year for poaching in India鈥檚 history. We taped conversations between Indian traders who were talking about trade being reopened. They were stockpiling ivory because they hoped that in the general flow of ivory to Japan their ivory would be easier to smuggle. Indian ivory joins African ivory before it goes to Japan or China. The biggest smuggling route out of India is through the United Arab Emirates, and African ivory always comes that way. Since the CITES conference in Nairobi last year, when it became clear there was not about to be a free-for-all in ivory trading, we have seen a decline in poaching. I agree these are knee-jerk reactions. But with a species that is so few in number, small fluctuations can affect the entire population.
Conservationists who oppose limited culling are sometimes accused of putting animals before people. Has that charge ever been levelled at you?
No. I definitely don鈥檛 put animals before people. India is a mosaic of life forms, and human beings have certain needs which have to be met. The average Indian is not against animals as long as they don鈥檛 impact on their daily life. I don鈥檛 believe you can put a wire around a place and keep animals inside and humans outside.
You were an ecologist. When did you move from studying wildlife to campaigning for it?
Two things happened. By 1987, many of the wild places that I had walked through and loved as a child were completely destroyed. We were on our way to becoming a billion people, and a billion people take up space. There was an unprecedented rate of destruction of natural habitat in India. My fascination with keeping animals as pets also ended then. Every time I had wanted a new bird I could get it, and I got to know about the people who were running this trade. I wrote a series of articles about the illegal wildlife trade and the Worldwide Fund for Nature asked me if I wanted to do something to try to stop it.
Are you only concerned with large mammals?
I do concentrate on large mammals now, but I started off with birds and my heart goes out to all wildlife. But there are so many failures in conservation that people tend to get demoralised. Something like the Tibetan antelope or the elephant are battles that can be won.
Does the energy that you put into conservation come from love of animals or love of science?
I have a passion for wildlife, and if you have a passion for something it can keep you going for years. I started off just watching animals as a child. My hero was Gerald Durrell. I wrote to him when I was 14 and he even wrote back. You can do research and stay completely unbiased, but you should also be able to have an emotional attachment to a species. You shouldn鈥檛 get attached to animals in your studies and experiments but surely you should be aware of why you are doing them. That is why I moved to campaigning. I should have gone on to do a PhD. Although I use science as a tool, I鈥檓 certainly not doing conservation to attain academic excellence.