China 100,000 Elephants - Ivory's prices are escalating and due to that, more elephants are suffering from poaching. The consequences could be devastating at this point, though.
It's been reported that a 100,000 elephants were killed in the last three years because of their ivory and for the trade of it. China is at the moment the biggest consumer of ivory and the market is "out of control."
"African elephants could disappear from the wild within a generation," said Lain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save The Elephants, and NBC noted. The statement is shocking and frightening. Still, he's not the only one.
As a matter of fact, Prince William spoke on Monday at the World Bank International Corruption Hunters Alliance Conference in Washington. The Duke of Cambridge didn't mince on his words and went straight to the point.
"The illegal wildlife trade is one of the most insidious forms of corruption and criminality in the world today," the Prince stated according to the Independent.
He also calculated the rise in the price of ivory from $5 to $2,115 the kilogram in twenty-five years. Due to this, the poaching has also risen and it's now worse than ever.
There was a study conducted by the Colorado State University, which was the one that determined the 100,000 elephants killed recently. The quantity was killed between 2010 and 2012, seemingly.
But further from that, the University also calculated that a sever percent of the entire African elephants population was lost every year to poaching. And the births only add five percent.
So, in basic terms, more elephants are being killed than the ones that are born. 100,000 elephants are a number of animals calculated up to 2012, so who knows up to this day how many more have been killed.
Also, the retail prices in Beijing, China, have increased more than 13 times since 2002. There are also laws in China regulating the ivory sales, but these are not being adequately enforced, according to CNN.
There's also a lot of illegal selling, at least seventy-eight percent of the ivory shops in Beijing are illegal.
What's being said, in short terms, is that if China doesn't do something about the ivory sales soon, the elephants killed will not be 100,000, but all of them very soon.
