Name: This Reporter Wants to Stop Illegal Ivory Trade
Uploaded: 2016-05-24
Duration: 2 min 25 s
Description: And is getting help from the U.S. in China

So your story made a big splash, you got a lot of attention. Give me a sense of what the impact was. So my area of expertise is crime and I wanted to take on what I thought was the biggest area of crime when it comes to wildlife. And one of the biggest is certainly elephants. So I had one of the world's best taxidermist build me a fake elephant tusk. And then inside I had an engineer design for me a satellite based GPS system. We laid that inside, hand painted the tusks, coated them in the same coating that NASCAR vehicles are coated in. Really? Yeah, because there shipped in bulk, you know. And they bang around in can chip. So like a, I get it, like a performance coating. Yeah, yeah. North from the Central African Republic puts you in Sudan, and my tusks went almost directly into Darfur. Where I was told by defectors of the Lord's Resistance army that Joseph Kony was operating and that Joseph Kony was having his men bring ivory up to him in Darfur. So just to give so that everybody's reminded of who Joseph Kony is and what he did. He's from Uganda. He's He's responsible for rape and murder, hitting tens of thousands of people. So is there, has anything changed as a result of your work? A little less than two months after the story came out, the President of China and President Obama announced that they would shut down their domestic ivory markets. Then that is enormous. And is that actually happening? Certainly the dialog has increased, and the pressure has increased. They didn't give a timeline as to when they would do that. There's a proposal just about to come out that is going to try to put feet to the fire on that. But it's a remarkable change by China Because only eight years earlier, China had argued successfully against the world, let us buy ivory. They were allowed a one time only purchase of what amounted to about 62 ton, 68 ton sale of ivory, and China built the world's largest ivory carving factory to anticipate a future. Of ivory, and within eight years they've turned that. They've turned that almost exclusively because the world's brought attention to the problem. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

This Reporter Wants to Stop Illegal Ivory Trade

And is getting help from the U.S. in China