Every 15 minutes an elephant dies. Just think about that statistic for a minute. In the time it takes to travel from Time Square to Central Park by subway, one of the largest mammals currently left on Earth will die. "The Ivory Game", (a Netflix documentary) looks specifically at the costs of making a black market for Ivory. In Asia it is currently legal to profit off of Ivory, and as the documentary explains one tusk of Ivory can range from tens of thousands of dollars. The less elephants there are, the higher the price of ivory goes up.
The Ivory Game focuses on the physical war against elephants throughout Africa, and the trading wars for Ivory and the costs that have recently sky rocketed in countries like China. Within a few instances the elephants who were killed had completely decapitated bodies. There's a very distinct scene where a heard of elephants roam in the open and reconstruct the skeleton of one of their fallen. They feel these killings on a much deeper intellectual level than humans could ever understand.
With the current projections and the hunger for getting ivory, Elephants will go extinct within the next 15 years at this pace. The dark reality is even if we do weaken this black market trade, even if we minimize and one day collapse these illegal killings the damage has almost become irreversible. Elephants will face extinction at some point in our life times now, it's just a matter of if it'll be sooner rather than later.
What this documentary doesn't touch on as much is another prominent animal in Africa which is on the extinction chopping block, Rhinos. Rhino's currently are being hunted just as much as elephants for their ivory. Once the Elephants go, so will the Rhino's. This will largely distroy and threaten the balance food chains and eco systems in this part of the world. The documentary does however point towards good signs that this illegal trade may soon become crippled and die out. China and the United States have signed agreements this year to work together to ban the sales and trades of Ivory.
It mostly comes down to a race against the clock. Children in 20 years will only be able to view and imagine these creatures in coloring books or displays at the Museum of Natural History. Some of the last, most largest majestic creatures that still roam our planet could vanish by the end of 2030 and we won't have any idea what's happened until it's already too late.
