To Save an Elephant

In 1979 1.5 million elephants roamed the plains of Africa. Ten years later, a million of these majestic creatures had been ruthlessly slaughtered - a massacre of over 2,000 elephants a week. Total extinction of the species seemed inevitable. This is the true story of how the billion-dollar illegal ivory trade, responsible for over 90 percent of the elephant deaths, was infiltrated and exposed by a small band of dedicated wildlife investigators. A chance stumbling upon the story of a smuggling ship running poached ivory up the coast of East Africa to the Middle East, led Allan Thornton and Dave Currey, co-directors of the tiny and underfunded Environmental Investigation Agency, to delve into the sinister and dangerous underworld of ivory smuggling syndicates. Appalled by what they found, and by the fact that nobody in the world, not even the large wildlife conservation groups, seemed to be taking effective steps to expose the illegal poaching, they started an investigation which was to last two years and was to take them and a handful of colleagues to four continents and back. A real-life Indiana Jones adventure, complete with sinister "Mr Big" ivory traders from Hong Kong, ruthless and murderous big game poachers, South African spies, and double-dealing officials, this book tells how the "eco-detectives" painstakingly pieced together an explosive expose that shocked the world into banning the ivory trade altogether in October 1989. Allan Thornton came to England from Canada to co-found Greenpeace UK and, as its executive director from 1978-81 and again from 1986-8, helped implement the work of the vessel Rainbow Warrior. He has been involved in numerous environmental campaigns, and is co-founder and chairman of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency. Dave Currey has a BA in Photographic Arts and is executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency. He was involved with a number of wildlife conservation groups as photographer and conservationist before co-founding EIA with Allan Thornton and Jennifer Lonsdale.