Investing in elephant futures

(Originally published in The Observor some ten years ago)

Should Africa's elephants be harvested for their ivory, or should they be left to live their lives in peace? The question is nothing like so simple as at first it may seem. One issue that seems to have been overlooked in debates on the ethics of international trade in ivory is the basic biology of the elephant. Because of the rate at which elephants' tusks grow, it may make economic sense for dealers not to buy ivory today, but to invest in "elephant futures" and thus conserve the great beasts of Africa.

Everyone who loves animals would like the elephants to be left " in peace". But it is clear, first of all, that populations of elephants, left to themselves, swell and collapse like those of lemmings - albeit on a timescale of decades or centuries. When elephants had the entire continent to roam in, then fair enough: such space could absorb the enormous ecological shock of their peaks and troughs. But, if they are confined to national parks, as they are now, then they are bound to run into ecological disaster unless their numbers are regulated. So if we care about the elephants' long- term survival we have to be prepared to cull them. And if they have to be culled anyway, then why not take their tusks to pay local people to maintain the parks? Local people are important: and all wildlife is doomed - probably - unless local people acquiesce in its protection.

Others point out, again with justice, that if there is a legitimate trade in ivory based on elephants culled systematically (from parks) then an illegitimate trade could ride on its back: based on
poached elephants. Africa's elephants have declined from an estimated 1.2 million at the end of the 1970s to 600,000 by the end of the 1980s, and 80 percent of the ivory that has appeared on the market in the past decade has been poached. The only way to cut out the poaching is to eliminate the ivory trade altogether. It was this argument that recently prompted the Kenyan government to order a vast cache of tusks to be burnt. Some people just feel a general disgust for the trade. Dr John Leger, a South African conservationist, said: "Ivory belongs in the same league as ashtrays made from the hands of gorillas."

On purely rational grounds, it seems impossible to choose between the two strategies. Any decision seems bound to be based either on guesswork or on simple emotion; and although emotion is a sine qua non, it should not be the sole guide to action.

Yet there is a possible compromise. It derives from work at Dr John Beddington's Renewable Resources Assessment Department at Imperial College, London. For it could be in everybody's interests, when harvesting ivory, simply to let the animals die of old age and to take tusks only from animals that have died a natural death. It should pay the harvesters of ivory assiduously to protect tuskers throughout their lives, and to ensure that they live as long as possible. Then, when the animal finally dies (after a peaceful life), the financial reward would be enormous. Thus, the demands of commerce and of humanitarianism would be reconciled.

This notion is based on the biology of the elephant. Most of an animal's physical attributes - its ears, its liver, and its brain - reach a certain size as it matures, and then stop growing. They may even shrink in old age. But the teeth of some animals continue to grow throughout life, and so it is with elephants' tusks.

Furthermore, the growth of elephants' tusks is exponential." Exponential" does not mean "fast",
as the sub-editors of The Economist apparently suppose. It means that the rate of growth increases as time passes. Thus a 30-year old, and the 50-year old's might be twice as big as the 40-year old's. The bull that ran its biblical span of threescore years and ten should be marvellously endowed.

The argument also works the other way round. Suppose, for example, that you decide the first year to harvest a certain weight of ivory from a particular elephant population. You do this, sensibly enough,

by killing the elephants with the largest tusks. But if you decide the following year to harvest the same amount again - having established a market in the first year to harvest the same amount again - having established a market in the first year - then you will find that you have to kill more elephants than you killed the first year, because those that are left have smaller tusks. The following year the position will be worse, because those that are left will have much smaller tusks. Such a harvesting policy - taking more and more animals, of younger and younger age, each year - sounds insane. Nevertheless, says Dr Beddington, this is precisely what has been happening among many African herds, which is why the decline is not only continuing, but accelerating.

Suppose now, though, that you are a Japanese dealer in ivory (it is, after all, the Japanese who account for most of the trade). You could simply arrange with your African contacts to go and kill elephants. But if you were astute, you would realise that if you waited a year, or five, or 10, you could harvest enormously more than if you struck immediately. It could pay you, in fact, not to buy ivory, but to buy futures in ivory. Of course you have to make a living in the meantime. But as the growth rate of the ivory is exponential, and the interest rate on borrowed money is not, it could well pay you, even in naive cash terms, to borrow money for the immediate protection of the elephants - provided only that you are guaranteed to take possession of the tusks eventually. And again, because the rate of growth of the ivory is exponential, this waiting strategy would become more and more attractive with each passing year. It would pay you, indeed, to keep it up until the friendly animal finally keeled over, a happy and fulfilled septuagenarian.

Such a strategy would raise new problems. Big old animals are obstructive: it would put an enormous strain on parks (and on fellow elephants), if all the old males were encouraged to stay on. But when they are old they are largely solitary; and it would not be inhumane to keep them apart corrals. The younger herd of the forest would then be regarded (by the commercial dealers) as seed corn for the future. Of course, the argument that a legitimate trade would open the door for an illegitimate trade would still apply. However, if the ivory trade was run on these rational lines, and if the price of ivory was maintained, there would be so much money in the business that it would profit the traders to pay today's poachers to act as guardians; and there is no finer gamekeeper than an erstwhile poacher.

John Beddington's general aim at Imperial is to "found workable technologies upon sound ecological principles". Here is one possibility.

Colin Tudge presents BBC radio's science programme, "Spectrum". He is writing a book on animal conservation, "Last Animals at the Zoo", to be published by Century Hutchinson.