The documentary “The Ivory Game” is released in 2016, it focuses on ivory has become a global concern, showing governments and environmental protectors against poachers and Chinese ivory merchants.
Andrea Costa, the head of the investigation goes to Beijing, China, and Hong Kong to investigate the ivory trade and market. He is shocked about the Beijing market because selling ivory here is legal. But why is there still so much ivory being shipped to Beijing? Because the amount of ivory the Chinese government allows ivory shops to buy is too low, so they need to buy more ivory but is illegal.
During the investigation, Craig Miller has a quote about ivory. “The less the elephants there are, the more the price rises. The more the prices rise, the more people want to kill them.” This shows why elephants are keep getting killed, because they are valuable, and poachers are so hard to track making them so easy to get away with the ivory and leave the elephant dead.
Elephants in the documentary are huge but so many of them have short ivory, or one side of ivory is shorter than the other. Sometimes, when the poacher gets the ivory from the elephants it also makes them die, almost every ivory that has been collected will be shipped to China. However, in Africa some people kill elephants is not for their ivory, is because the elephant has to affect the crops of the local people’s life.
From the investigation in China, a normal small shop selling ivory can have up to 4 tons of ivory lying in the storage, it won’t be hard to imagine how much ivory can a big ivory shop hold onto, stores keep storing these ivories because they know that elephant numbers will decrease and at that time the ivory price will only increase.
In Hong Kong, there are a lot of flows in the regulations for ivory, making Hong Kong the second biggest place for ivory trading, because Hong Kong is below China, which makes illegal much easier. So, many containers are being shipped from Africa to Hong Kong and transported by land to China.
In the documentary, it’s crazy that there are so many people in Vietnam and China who help sell ivory for a living. A village in Vietnam corporate with the local police to help them cover the illegal business. In China, police are even part of the business.
The most heartbreaking of the documentary are those poachers just need to put a bullet in the elephant and they benefit thousands and millions of dollars from the ivory. It takes elephants to grow that size and take them so long to grow the ivory as well, but a bullet can just end everything.
Sometimes these protectors need to risk their life for further investigation on who is head of telling people to kill the elephant. If it’s too late to stop then there will be only more and more elephants dying.
And the end of the documentary, Kenya has burned over 100 tons of ivory in 2016, but there are still more than 600 tons are stored in countries in Africa. The ivory trade in Hong Kong, China, and America has been completed banned. Until today, protectors are still fighting for elephants to protect them from dying.
I would recommend this documentary because it completely shows the ivory trade and elephants dying from poachers around the world. It’s hard to believe that human actually does these wildlife animals just for their own benefit. They didn’t do anything to humans but we are the ones killing them and making them go extinct