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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
Some of the last big tuskers gather in Tsavo, Kenya. A single large tusk sold on the local black market can bring $6,000, enough to support an unskilled Kenyan worker for ten years.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images, at the University of Santo Tomas Museum
The largest ivory crucifix in the Philippines hangs in a museum in Manila. The body of Christ, 30 inches long, is carved from a single tusk. The piece dates to the early 1600s, when Spanish galleons began bringing Asian ivory craftsmanship to Spain and the New World.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
The home of a Filipino collector is lavish with ivory religious icons. “I don’t see the elephant,” says another Filipino collector. “I see the Lord.”
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
Bodies are what remain in Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjidah National Park after one of the largest mass elephant slaughters in decades. Armed with grenades and AK-47s, poachers killed more than 300.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
A worker in China’s largest ivory-carving factory finishes a piece symbolizing prosperity. China legally bought 73 tons of ivory from Africa in 2008; since then, poaching and smuggling have both soared.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
Smugglers failed to get this contraband past Kenya’s law enforcement, but the animals are still gone. Small tusks indicate that young elephants were poached.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
Kruba Dharmamuni, aka the Elephant Monk, keeps Asian elephants at his temple in Thailand. Activists accuse him of starving one elephant to use its ivory for amulets, a charge he rejects.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
To keep the ivory from the black market, a plainclothes ranger hacks the tusks off a bull elephant killed illegally in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. In the first half of this year six park rangers died protecting Kenya’s elephants; meanwhile, rangers killed 23 poachers.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
A Chinese reporter in Kenya covers the 2011 burning of 5.5 tons of smuggled ivory. Kenya helped launch a global ivory ban in 1989 but lately has been stockpiling its ivory. The ivory here belonged to other countries.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
A sculpture like this can take a master carver years to produce. Front and center are the popular Taoist gods Shou, Lu, and Fu—symbols of long life, money, and luck. “We hope—no, we insist—we can continue to protect these skills,” says Wang Shan, secretary-general of the China Arts and Crafts Association.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
Filipino master ivory carver Marcial Bernales transforms an elephant tusk into the head and hands of the Madonna. His first love is carving wood, but ivory has a special draw. “Much high prices,” he says. Smuggled ivory flows to Asia via the Philippines, itself a destination for illegal ivory, which is carved into religious icons and often smuggled to other countries, including the United States. Raw tusks are not Bernales’s only medium—the heads of some of his saints began as billiard balls.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
Some two million Roman Catholics join a yearly procession celebrating the Santo Niño de Cebu (Holy Child of Cebu). Seen here is the Mother Mary image, Our Lady of Consolation, with ivory head and hands. On Cebu the word for ivory also means “religious statue.”
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
A cemetery for privately owned elephants in Surin, Thailand, shows deep devotion. Thailand allows internal trading of ivory from domesticated Asian elephants, and smuggled African ivory finds its way into the mix.
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Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
The “red elephants” of Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park owe their color to the red soil, which they roll in as a dirt bath. Across Africa, sustained poaching of bulls and large females makes orphans of the young and distorts the gene pool in favor of weaker, smaller animals.
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