London - For the past four months, Alexei had been enduring some of the harshest conditions on the planet. Marooned on a huge island in the frozen wastes of Siberia, his food had run out long ago, and he was eating scrawny seagulls.
The last Russians who had come here had been sent to one of Stalin’s Gulags. When the blizzards got particularly bad, he would grimly chuckle to himself that the only difference between him and the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror was that he was here by his own volition.
At times he felt like giving up. But, like many who hunt for treasure, he would convince himself that today would be the day. And so, that morning, Alexei tramped out of his ragged tent and across the ice.
In his right hand he carried a spade, and slung over his shoulder was a rifle — in case of polar bears. After five hours, he had still not found what he was looking for. Dejected, he sat down to eat a piece of half-cooked gull. As he chewed, he cast his eyes down a few yards to his left, and that was when he spotted it glistening in the sun.
He had made the discovery of his lifetime. For Alexei, it was better than gold.
It was a mammoth tusk, and lying next to it was another. Both were perfectly preserved and could fetch as much as £50 000 (about R900 000).
What’s more, these tusks had the ability to save a creature that lived thousands of miles away in a very different sort of landscape — the African elephant.
For decades, this much-loved and majestic giant has been poached to such an extent that its numbers have dropped from about 1.2 million in 1980 to around just 400 000 today. And we know why this happening: the insatiable demand for ivory, the trade of which is banned worldwide.
But despite it being outlawed, the black market is flourishing. Just this month, customs officials at Zurich airport seized 578 lb of ivory from Tanzania, which would have come from 40 to 50 elephants and was worth an estimated £260 000.
The destination for much of this black market ivory is China — the largest importer of illegal elephant tusks in the world. Some experts reckon that China may import some 60 tons of ivory per year, which would require the illicit slaughter of at least 1 200 elephants. Sadly, that figure may well be an underestimate.
Some partially successful steps have been taken to try to strangle the supply of ivory. In 1990, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) brought about a worldwide ban, which made a huge dent in the trade. In addition, poachers are tracked down and often shot dead like the very animals they hunt — although it is impossible to deal with every poacher on a continent the size of Africa.
Several high-profile names, including Prince William and Chelsea Clinton, have done their best to raise awareness of the problem, as well as demand that measures to save the elephants are coordinated across notoriously ill-governed countries.
But despite all these efforts, African elephants are still being slaughtered in their thousands, and somehow their ivory ends up for sale on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, where a carved tusk can sell for as much as £100 000, and a bangle for £1 000.
Such prices are no deterrent for the newly-enriched Chinese middle-class, who regard the purchase of ivory as a vital part of keeping up with the Wangs.
So can anything be done to save the elephant in its natural habitat? The solution may well lie in the permafrost of the Arctic Circle, for buried there, from Alaska to Siberia, are an estimated 150 million frozen corpses of the modern elephant’s ancestor — the woolly mammoth. The bodies of these mammoths have been remarkably preserved thanks to being in a deep freeze for ten thousand years.
During the summer, when the permafrost partially melts, the remains are exposed and are sought by prospectors, who spend months hunting for them in incredibly harsh conditions.
These remains include the mammoths’ vast tusks, the ivory from which is almost identical to those of today’s elephants. Even trained eyes sometimes find it hard to tell the two apart, and only laboratory analysis can truly confirm which is which.
Because of this similarity, the past few years have seen a burgeoning trade in mammoth ivory, which is both legal and does not necessitate the killing of a dwindling species.
From 2007 to 2013, Hong Kong imported some 275 tons of mammoth ivory, the vast majority of which came from Siberia, and most of which ended up being exported to mainland China.
The cost is similar as well. Elephant ivory is bought wholesale for around £1,300 per kilogram, whereas mammoth ivory is a little cheaper, at around £1 200.
As a result, there have been calls for the trade in mammoth ivory to be encouraged, and ultimately, for it to replace the elephant ivory market.
One of those voices is Peter Taylor’s, a former executive at a mining company in Africa. He has established an organisation called Mammoth Mining, which seeks to mine and sell mammoth ivory to save elephants.
‘”’ve spent a lot of time working in West Africa where I saw the wholesale slaughter of elephants,” he says. Although Mr Taylor acknowledges that the work of CITES and anti-poaching measures have had an effect, it became clear to him that there was only so much that could be achieved by these methods.
“Most developing nations are pedalling as fast as they can,” he argues, “but conservation isn’t that big on the agenda when poverty has to be addressed. Stopping the trade in elephant ivory isn’t going to happen overnight — what’s needed is a change in the whole mindset.”
Mr Taylor’s concept is simple. By increasing the amount of mammoth ivory on the market, he would seek to reduce the demand for elephant ivory, with the aim of replacing it and thereby killing off the black market.
Any profits made would be channelled back into elephant conservation. Such a goal is ambitious. It involves having to deal with ivory hunters in remote parts of Russia, and to convince the Chinese market to completely change and embrace what is known as “ice” ivory.
But there are some who think that using mammoth tusks is not the ivory bullet that will solve the problem. Among them is Professor Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, who, somewhat provocatively, wants the extinct mammoth to be listed as a protected species.
“If we want to shut the door on the poaching of elephants it may be necessary to shut down the trade in mammoth tusks, as it keeps up the demand for ivory,” he says.
The argument is rather similar to that applied against fake fur: mammoth ivory could be seen as supporting the perception of elephant ivory as a desirable item. Another problem is unscrupulous Chinese dealers selling elephant ivory while claiming that it comes from mammoths. In this way, mammoth ivory is used to “mask” the illegal trade in elephant tusks.
A report last year for Save The Elephant found that numerous pieces of “mammoth ivory” being sold in Beijing and Shanghai actually came from elephants.
“There seems to be no fear of inspection as the mammoth ivory trade is legal, thus serving as an easy smoke screen for elephant ivory sales,” their report states.
To make matters worse, it is very difficult and costly for customs officers to check whether a consignment of supposed mammoth ivory is not in fact from elephants poached last week in West Africa.
Despite these problems, many conservationists have no wish to see mammoth ivory banned.
“Consumers who are prevented from buying mammoth ivory may end up buying elephant ivory,” explains Esmond Martin, co-author of the report.
Some may find it distasteful to disturb the graves of prehistoric beasts, but that is surely preferable to the vile poaching that takes place on the savannah.
Daily Mail