I went through a wicked dinosaur phase in my pre-teen years, and was convinced that if my future as an NFL quarterback didn’t materialize I’d make a lateral career move and become a paleontologist. I figure 95 percent of the men reading this probably had a similar plan.
I was interested in T-rex and the rest of the Cretaceous dinos, for sure, but I was particularly interested in the Pleistocene megafauna that came last. These were the big animals that lived here – in North America, on the land beneath our feet – as recently as 10,000 years ago. There were American lions, 300-pound beavers, and, of course, mastodons. Back then my grandfather lived down near what they called the black dirt region in New York State, and we used to go picking arrowheads in the plow furrows and looking for fossils. In 2008, some canoeists found a 9-foot mastodon tusk near our old stomping grounds.
Can you picture herds of hairy, elephant-looking creatures wandering through the Northeast? There are vaguely scientific rumors that pockets of mastodons may have held out until as recently as 5,000 years ago – that’s around the same time the Egyptians were building the pyramids. Eventually they vanished, like all of the other large creatures from that day. Climate probably played a roll. Many suspect overhunting by early humans did, too.
I can describe a mastodon to my 4-year-old niece because she knows what an elephant looks like. Africa is the one continent where the megafauna held on. And yet today they’re getting killed at such a rate that my niece’s future children might not have any real world reference. According to this beautifully produced and crushingly blunt PSA, every elephant in Africa could be dead in 11 years.
I’m cynical enough not to entirely trust statistics in PSAs, but even if it’s 12, or 20, or 50 years, there’s no way around the fact that what’s going on with elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade is can’t-make-this-up horrible. This time we don’t need to wonder whether it’s climate, or an asteroid, or some other natural phenomenon that’s driving a species towards extinction. It’s humans. And the gut-wrenching scenes of mutilated elephant families left to rot on the savannah are connected to a host of terrorist organizations who use the ivory money to create equally gut-wrenching scenes, some of them full of mutilated human families.
The campaign says to end ivory-funded terrorism now. It makes me feel powerless. I wish I knew how to help in a substantive way, but I don’t. I guess the least any of us can do is pass on the word.