Reading further than I had previously, I found this ... it would seem that nearly 190 years ago, there was being voiced concern about the slaughter of elephants to satisfy demand for 'baubles'. It's sad that nothing much has changed ....
"In
1827, the customs upon elephants' teeth, the duty being 20s. per cwt,
amounted to £3,257, exhibiting an importation of 364,784 lbs. In
eleven years from 1788 to 1798, 18,914 cwt of ivory was imported,
which shows an average annual importation of 192,579 lbs. The
consumption, therefore, is either increased in Great Britain, or,
from our possession of the colony of the Cape of Good Hope, we are
enabled to supply the demands of foreign nations.
The
average weight of an elephant's tusk is about 60 lbs. To have
produced, therefore, 364,784 lbs of ivory, the import of 1827, 6,080
tusks must have been procured. This fact assumes the annual
slaughter of at least 3,040 elephants. The real havoc is much
greater; Mr B. in his travels in Africa, met with some elephant
hunters who had shot twelve elephants, which produced no more than
200 lbs weight of ivory, as all the animals except one, happened to
be females. If anything like the same ill-luck, or want of skill,
attended all the African elephant hunters, upwards of forty thousand
of these animals would be annually slain to supply our demand for
ivory baubles."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A friend in Thailand who reads my blog regularly, noted my comment about illustrations and pictures of elephants from the past, were obviously done by artists who had never actually seen an elephant, and were working from a verbal description.
He sent me this picture, which he took some time ago in Chester Cathedral !
No comments:
Post a Comment