~~June 19, 2014~~
Broadcaster, Conservation Biologist, Educator
The bloody ‘War Against Nature‘ is roiling in Africa and it’s being fueled by a voracious Asian demand for animal parts. The Animal Kingdom is under siege, extinction looms for many of Earth’s last great beasts.
Deplorable poachers inflicting excruciating deaths upon rhino. This frenzied level of brutality is unconscionable.
Photo credit: StopRhinoPoaching.com
Since my emotional broadcast across Australia in December on this maniacal bloodlust, poaching has escalated. This is heartbreaking news and like our dying oceans, its time that the world’s leaders concentrated on maintaining Earth’s biodiversity now because our global environment is being ransacked harder and faster than ever before in the history of Earth.
Japanese whaling fleet’s harpoon vessel, Yushin Maru No. 2, with the slaughtered minke whale in Mackenzie Bay. The Japanese ocean-killers have mercilessly butchered over 15,000 whales since the 1986 world moratorium on whaling. Please support the direct-action conservation work of Sea Shepherd Global.
Photo credit: Glenn Lockitch / Sea Shepherd Australia
A freshly decapitated young bull elephant. Every 15 minutes another elephant is murdered. What kind of a world are we leaving the children?
Photo credit: wfuv.org
Each hour, 24/7/365, four majestic elephants are slaughtered for their ivory tusks.
21 tons of elephant ivory was confiscated in 2013. How many more tons this year are being gobbled up on the black market? Unknown, vast quantities.
Photo credit: aljazeera.com
Cameroon has announced that is has sent special army units to stop Northern Sudanese bloody poachers from entering its territory to decapitate elephants for their ivory.
Photo credit: economyanimals.blogspot.com
Forty years ago there were at least 1.2 million African elephants. Today, there are less than 400,000 elephants remaining. Thirty-five thousand beasts are poached each year. At this sickening rate of extermination, elephants will be extinct, which means gone forever, by 2025.
This unquenchable demand for rhino horn is coming from Vietnam, China and Thailand. In 2010 a rumor began circulating that a Vietnamese minister’s relative was cured by rhino horn powder. In addition, Chinese medicine routinely uses rhino horn powder to purportedly cure a range of ailments from rheumatism to ridding the soul of the devil. Photo credit: davest.wordpress.com
The savagery that is taking place in the name of supplying humans with animal parts, like this butchered rhino, is enough to make a grown man drop to his knees and weep uncontrollably. Nature and its Animal Kingdom stands no chance against this rapacious, blood thirsty human onslaught. Unless a massive worldwide concerted effort is mounted immediately, rhinos and elephants (and all other big game) will vanish quickly from the face of Earth.
Photo credit: allafrica.com
Every 8 hours, 24/7/365, one magnificent rhino is murdered for its $500,000 horn.
Since the 1960s rhino numbers have plummeted from 500,000 to 29,000.Chillingly, since 2007, poaching rhinos has increased five thousand percent. At this deranged rate of annihilation, rhinos will be extinct by 2020.
Scientists have irrefutably shown that rhino horn, which is comprised of keratin, is about as effective at curing cancer, common colds, or hangovers – as eating a human finger nail (which is also made up of keratin). There is no medicinal value in rhino horn whatsoever. Rhino horn is now seen in the Orient as a status symbol and it has become a magnet for the nouvelle riche. Ground-up rhino horn powder is being touted as a cure for hangovers, common colds and it’s even being used as a party drug.
Photo credit: cdnsmescience.com
A heartbreaking photo of an orphaned calf mourning its mother’s loss. Since 2002, the African forested elephant population has plummeted by 76 percent. In Tanzania alone the population estimate in 2008 was approximately 165,000 — today there are fewer than 23,000 elephants left.
Photo credit: express.co.uk
These loathsome poachers are armed with sophisticated weapons flowing-freely out of Libya where former oil baron and dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had stockpiled tons of armament. Using helicopters Lord’s Resistance Army shot elephants from the air, quickly landed, chain-sawed tusks off and carved animals open removing brains and genitalia for an insatiable Asian marketplace that craves animal aphrodisiacs and hokum animal cures for human diseases.
Garamba National Park just lost four percent of its dwindling elephant population of less than 2,000 critters. Twenty years ago, the Park boasted a robust population of over 20,000 elephants.
The Great Satao with his magnificent tusks.
Photo credit: markdeeble.wordpress.com
Today an even more exasperating announcement came across the wire from Tsavo National Park, Kenya. The world’s largest remaining elephant and last of the great tuskers ‘Great Satao’ with his extraordinary couple hundred-pound tusks reaching the ground was murdered with poisoned darts. Kenya lost its national icon and Earth lost a priceless global treasure including its phenomenal genetics.
Despite 24/7 protection, despicable poachers finally stole Great Satao’s breathtaking tusks, which were more reminiscent of a Pleistocene Ice Age Columbian mammoth rather than a modern-day African elephant.
~~FULL READ/SOURCE/FULL CREDIT~~
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-reese-halter/bloody-poachers-oragnized_b_5501497.html
~~AND IT STILL GETS WORSE~~
~~Uploaded June 17, 2014~~
Join Earth Dr. Reese Halter for another segment of SOS as he explains the awful poaching bloodlust for animal parts to supply the SE Asia and Chinese marketplace.
We ALL are connected through NATURE!!
We ALL are ONE!!
It Is What It Is 
Horrible and horrific. At some point the countries where this is happening will have to stand up and enact laws that make the price for this so heavy it is no longer worth it otherwise it will never end
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I wonder ….. another one of the world’s problems that some don’t want to see.
This breaks my heart!! 😦
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