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BYLINE: Jonathan Leake ; Ross Clark SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 22 LENGTH: 1736 words

It began as a routine flight across one of the world's most beautiful wildernesses, but it ended in shock. Lee White, a British conservationist who looks after the national parks in Gabon, on the west coast of central Africa, had expected to find thriving herds of elephants. Instead, he was counting corpses.

"As we flew across the patches of savanna in Wonga-Wongue park we could see dark circles on the grass. Each one was a rotting elephant carcass," he said.

"We found 40 of them, and for each one we could see we knew there were 10 more hidden in the bush. We were looking at the mass slaughter of around 400 elephants."

What White had encountered in his seemingly idyllic corner of Africa was the grim face of a global trade that is shifting millions of pounds worth of elephant ivory, rhino horn and tiger products around the globe every year.

Gabon's forest elephants, a sub-species of the African elephant, are a prime target because their short, straight tusks have a fine grain prized by ivory carvers and can fetch thousands of pounds a set.

"The poachers were very organised," White said. "They were shooting from the hilltops onto the elephants and then running down with a chainsaw to cut their skulls in half to get the tusks out and escape before we found them. The elephants were left to rot."

The story is the same all over Africa with poachers estimated to have killed 75% of forest elephants. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 390,000 out of 400,000 elephants have been wiped out. It is not just elephants. Rhinos are also being devastated, with 1,000 shot last year in South Africa alone out of a global population of just 30,000.

Poachers have cut the number of tigers in the wild to below 4,000 - so few that many may not meet a prospective mate for years.

So great is the pace of destruction that Prince William is about to take it up as his first big cause. This week he will formally launch his United for Wildlife charity with a two-day scientific symposium in London at which White is speaking.

On Thursday the prince will join

1 Fight the poachers Wildlife rangers are increasingly being given guns and military training. Some countries, such as Botswana, have adopted a shoot-on-sight policy against poachers

2 Block the trade Train border officials and police to spot illicit products, confiscate them and arrest the owners

3 Destroy the market Police crackdowns are just a start. The best long-term measure is to educate people about the damage done when they buy wildlife products

4 Promote tourism When local people gain from wildlife tourists visiting their area they should see the benefit of protecting animals

5 Farming The resurgence of white rhinos in South Africa is partly down to farmers breeding them for wildlife parks - a strategy that could work for many other species David Cameron and representatives of 60 other states for a conference on how best to tackle the trade.

"We have to be the generation that stopped the illegal wildlife trade and secured the future of these magnificent animals," he says in a video released today.

Before it can be stopped, however, the trade must be understood. What is driving the surge in poaching? Why have species such the elephant, the rhino and the tiger become so much more valuable dead than alive? THE answer lies largely in Asia, in particular in China, Vietnam and Taiwan. While all three have booming economies and a burgeoning, aspirational middle class, the traditions and superstitions of the past still have a strong hold.

China is the main market for ivory, according to John Scanlon, the secretarygeneral of Cites (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), the organisation that oversees the global trade in wildlife.

For centuries ivory was the preserve of the elite, who called it white gold and displayed it as a symbol of their wealth. Craftsmen perfected elaborate carvings of entire landscapes of mountains, temples and waterfalls using one large tusk. Nowadays far more people are rich and buy ivory to show that they, too, have now made it - known as status consumption.

"We are also seeing new speculative markets emerging in China," said Scanlon. "Ivory may now be treated as an investment. People are stockpiling it in the hope it will acquire more value as elephants become more rare. In a sense they are banking on extinction."

The main demand for rhinos comes from a bizarre belief in Vietnam and some of its neighbours that the horn has near-magical benefits for health. The conviction appeared to have been laid to rest in 1993 when Vietnam and China banned all trade in the horn. By 2007 poaching had fallen to fewer than a dozen animals a year.

That all changed when a rumour swept Vietnam that a leading politician had been cured of cancer by drinking a potion containing powdered rhino horn. Suddenly, everyone wanted it.

Tigers have a similar mystique. Tiger bones have been claimed by some in China to cure arthritis. Tiger penis soup is touted as a delicacy. There are even "tiger wines" laced with powdered bones.

A global network has sprung up to smuggle lucrative items across the borders of countries which are often too poor to protect the animals.

"These are the same kind of people that smuggle drugs or arms and they are very clever," White said. "They use one port for a while but as soon as it gets detected they move to another."

A remarkable number of illicit wildlife products are passing through western airports, too. In 2012-13 Britain's Border Force, which operates a wildlife unit based at Heathrow, made 690 seizures involving 2.5m illegal items. Of these, 326 were ivory. There were also 93 live animals including four leopards and some vultures.

Few species can withstand exploitation on an industrial scale but large, slow-breeding ones such as rhinos, tigers and elephants are the most vulnerable.

Worst affected have been rhinos. Africa's western black rhino was declared extinct in 2011. The northern white rhino is down to just four animals, while the last 40 Javan rhinos face not only poachers but the threat of being wiped out by Little Krakatoa, an active volcano that towers over their last refuge.

SO WHAT are the options facing this week's London conference? Perhaps the most obvious is to outlaw the trade, but that seldom works, as we know from many failed wars on drugs. Ivory and rhino horn are illegal in China and Vietnam, but the market has just kept growing.

What about better enforcement? The conference comes after the French government's public destruction last week of three tons of ivory seized at Paris airports. Seven hundred tusks were fed into a grinding machine at the Eiffel Tower.

Scanlon believes that destroying illicit stocks is important because "it makes clear that if you illegally acquire ivory it will never have a commercial value and is always at risk of being found and destroyed".

Education is another factor that has been shown to work. Europe and Britain were once the biggest markets for ivory, which was used to make everything from combs to piano keys and billiard balls. The market collapsed when the public began to care about its origin. Could that work in China? If so, it would take time, and for some species, time is short.

Some take a radically different approach, based on free market economics rather than regulation. One idea is to sell the right to shoot some rare animals and use the money to conserve the species.

Prince William was accused of hypocrisy by animal rights groups yesterday when it emerged that he is spending the days before the conference on a hunting trip to Spain to shoot wild boar.

But conservationists point out that well-managed hunting, like tourism, can be used to generate money for measures such as antipoaching patrols.

A recent Texas auction of a permit to hunt a black rhino in Namibia prompted a protest petition signed by 75,000 people. But Ben Carter, executive director of the Dallas Safari Club, saw it as a chance to raise $350,000 to counter illegal poaching. The permit allowed the shooting of a bull that was past breeding age.

Trophy hunting in Africa, where tourists pay to shoot lions and other big game, is already estimated to generate £130m a year.

The greater potential, however, lies not in shooting animals but in photographing them. Wildlife-based tourism generates estimated revenues of £7bn-8bn a year for Africa, with huge opportunities to expand if the animals can be protected from poachers.

Michael 't Sas-Rolfes, a South African wildlife economist who will speak this week, suggests farming rhinos so that the horn can be cropped and grown back.

His view is that farmed rhino would flood the market with legitimate horn, so bringing down the price. "You would empower the farmers to own the proceeds and disempower the poachers," he said. Others believe a legal trade could increase the demand in the Far East, and with it the danger.

Across Africa, the most common response to poaching has been to turn park rangers into paramilitary forces. When White told Gabon's government what was happening in his parks, President Ali Bongo ordered an expansion of the rangers into a 650-strong force and brought in US marines to train them.

"I signed up to protect animals by being a biologist and now I am overseeing a military war against poachers," said White, whose men engaged in half a dozen shootouts last year and announced the first "kill" of a poacher when arresting a 26-strong gang.

"It is so dangerous that I am thinking of introducing a shoot-on-sight policy. I came to this country when it was a paradise but it is turning into a hell in these places. There are even special forces guarding the Kruger national park in South Africa."

Even if the poaching can be curbed in the foreseeable future, the animals will face the continuing threat of a fastgrowing human population. The number of people in Africa is predicted to soar from 1bn to 4bn by 2100, putting pressure on every habitat.

A new book, The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, suggests the killing is already leading to destruction on a par with the asteroid strike thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

Scanlon, however, hopes that as Africa becomes more prosperous and better educated, it will come to value its wildlife faster than Europe did. He said: "By the time we learnt to care for our wolves, bears, lynx, eagles and bison, most of them were gone."

Additional reporting: Michael Sheridan, Bangkok

Source:

HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD'S MOST ENDANGERED ANIMALS; Prince William is taking on one of the toughest challenges on Earth with his attempt to stop the extinction of iconic species." Sunday Times (London, England) 2014: Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 7 Feb. 2015.