Search results

From sharks, rhinos to giraffes - they are the focus of the species conservation conference in Samarkand. As of November 24, 185 states in Uzbekistan will be wrestling over trade bans and restrictions. There is a lot at stake: the fate of more than 230 animal and plant species is being decided. The organization Pro Wildlife warns in advance of dangerous steps backwards in the Washington Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which regulates or even prohibits the international trade in plants and animals.

In response to valid concerns that increasing the demand for rhino horn by wealthy consumers in Asia (which far exceeds any possible supply from dehorning live rhinos), particularly over the last decade, has led to the killing of rhino and the decimation of many African rhino populations, the international trade in rhino horn is banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Unquestionably, the devastating loss of thousands of rhinos in South Africa particularly over the past two decades is not only due to the illegal killing of rhinos.

Six years ago, on the 21st August 2018, Michele Pickover, Executive Director of the EMS Foundation and Dr Smaragda Louw, Director of Ban Animal Trading, jointly presented their findings of an eighteen month investigation and research project about South Africa’s role in the international lion bone trade at a Colloquium held in the Parliament of South Africa.

A joint ambush conducted by Kenya's Wildlife Service and members of the DCI Serious Crime Unit has resulted in the arrest of 57-year-old Sila Waweu in Kiambu county. Waweu, who was accompanied by three others, was caught in Kenya's southern Kibwezi area with a bag containing 185 pounds of elephant tusks worth an estimated $65,000, while his accomplices managed to evade arrest.