With wildlife experts proposing more stricter laws to protect animals falling under Schedule-I, another incident of rhino poaching was reported from Kaziranga National Park on Monday.
With wildlife experts proposing more stricter laws to protect animals falling under Schedule-I, another incident of rhino poaching was reported from Kaziranga National Park on Monday.
Tigers are symbols of all that is powerful, mystical, and beautiful in nature. As an apex species, they reflect the health of the ecosystems in which they live and on which people depend. Unfortunately, adverse human activities have driven wild tigers to the brink of extinction. Over the past century, their numbers fell from 100,000 to about 3,500 today.
KATHMANDU: Nepal is seriously engaged in taking the on-going peace process to a positive conclusion, writing a new democratic Constitution within the stipulated time-frame, and meeting the rising aspirations of the Nepalese people.
The African elephant's misfortune has been its teeth, in particular the well developed pair of upper incisors known as tusks for which it is being killed in large numbers. The visible ivory part of the tusks is made up of dentine with an outer layer of enamel, and when viewed in cross section it reveals criss-cross lines that form a series of diamond shapes. This is what gives the elephant ivory its distinctive lustre, and makes it so valuable economically.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is the key international agreement regulating trade in wildlife. It works through a system of trade controls based on biological and international trade data of species.
The illegal slaughter of African elephants for ivory is now worse than it was at its peak in the 1980s. New forensic tools based on DNA analysis can help stop the cartels behind this bloody trade.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) secured an agreement in 1989 among its member states to ban the international trade in ivory. This disruption of the international ivory market was intended to reverse a sharp decline in the African elephant population, which resulted from widespread poaching for ivory in the previous decade.
Both Thailand and Vietnam have been identified during the past decade as centres of concern in ivory trade surveys and analyses undertaken for CITES by ETIS (Elephant Trade Information System). Thailand was one of the most important sites of illegal ivory trade at the global level and Vietnam was shown to have a moderate sized and largely unregulated ivory market.
