BY JOHN NASH
The British Government, still busy virtue-signalling as it sinks into the quicksand of its own making, has now decided to extend the import ban on ivory to cover animals like hippos, orcas, narwhals, walruses, and sperm whales. Defra, the Department for the Elimination of Farms and Agriculture, says that after elephants, the hippopotamus is the species most at risk of being hunted for its ivory. But imports of hippo teeth are not the problem for hippos. Their real problems are more Rumsfeld than African veldt – those pesky known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
As usual, the tooth ban is a decision that will make believers in the UK feel good about themselves (always good for votes from the ignorant, soft majority) and it will certainly help to fill the coffers of the parasitic eco-chuggers and celebrities who now plague social media and our TV ads. Typical of the sleb ban flag wavers this time is popular eco-action man and (now fast rising) TV presenter Steve Backshall, who said helpfully:
“This is an important moment in the conservation of these iconic species. There is widespread public support for the ivory ban and today by extending it further we are sending a clear message that there is no place in the UK for this vile trade”
Total bollocks, but spoken like any true hero to his less adventurous but adoring TV couch potatoes in the UK.
Unfortunately, once again, the ban will have absolutely no effect on most of the animals concerned, and in the case of hippos, it will increase the number of hippos killed, largely because hippos live in Africa, not in Defra or the Westminster Bubble.
Its forerunner, the fox hunting hound ban has been a total disaster for foxes while the world has lost at least 10,000 elephants every year since the global ban on trading ivory set out to save them, and as for rhinos, more than half have disappeared since the ban on rhino horn trade in 1977 assured us that it would “turn the tide”. Tell that to King Canute.
Bans don’t work when they are the result of deception by shiny-bums who sit in offices scheming up campaigns to justify their own existence or simply to harvest money, votes or social currency. You don’t really think that all the money donated in the UK to save this, that or the other actually reaches Africa, do you?
Sadly, hippos are not really like George from Rainbow TV or Gloria and Moto Moto from the Madagascar movies. In reality, they are very large, aggressive beasts that are less tolerant and even more viciously territorial than the average UK wildlife charity. They hang out in rivers, where their toilet habits would give Surfers Against Sewage the vapours, and spend their long, sunny days baring their enormous teeth at each other and amuse themselves by biting Africans’ canoes in half, often much to the terminal surprise of the unfortunate occupants.
In short, hippos, like many eco-worriers, are nice from far, but far from nice. They are huge, nasty-tempered beasts and occasionally, they conflict with the rising population of humans living near those same rivers. But they are also made of meat, half a ton of it and so, in impoverished areas, outside of reserves and far from tourist honey-pots, where there are no roads, shops or jobs, they are a resource for the more enterprising local bushmeat poachers. Hippos leave their river at night to graze, using the same narrow path, a habit that makes snaring them a straightforward matter using large snares of strong cable.
In Africa, very little every goes to waste. The bushmeat poacher may get say, £50 for the meat, and up to another £40 for the by-products – the skull, fat, bones, skin, bristle, feet, genitals, toes, tail and so on. Most of the by-products are made into hippo leather, charms or decorative items by artisans, adding considerably to their eventual price. That end price is not what the bushmeat hunter receives.
However, if you ban the importation of such items in the West, they can’t be exported, foreign dealers and tourists won’t buy them, so artisans won’t make them and the bushmeat hunter can’t sell them. Instead, he throws them away and sells only the meat. Now he makes only £50 out of each hippo instead of £90. It means that in order to keep up his income and his kids in school, he has to kill two hippos instead of one.
A foreign import ban may stop the importation of a number of hippo teeth and leather items in the West, but then those items will simply be thrown away in Africa unless someone smuggles them out to the Far East. When thrown away, they take artisans’ jobs with them, increasing local need to trade in other animal and plant materials. Thanks to the ban, more hippos will die and disappear unseen into smoky cooking pots across the continent.
The reality is that unlike this latest snake oil from the politico-parasite coalition, nobody actually kills hippos (or orcas, or walruses, or narwhals) for their teeth, so a ban on imports is an irrelevance. The teeth are actually a by-product of sport, subsistence or illegal hunting. Many come from carcasses or natural mortalities.
That’s why these matters should be left to the locals to decide.
John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa. His occasional cartoons, permitted in a free society, gloriously annoy the hell out of attic-dwelling trolls and other deadbeats.