I have a wildlife zoo

Lin Hao couldn't help but sigh.

He remembered a public service ad he had once seen.

An adult elephant and a baby elephant were walking across the beautiful savannah, facing the sunset.

The baby elephant happily said, "Mom, I have teeth!"

"..."

"Mom, I have teeth, yay!"

The baby elephant didn't receive congratulations from its mother but only silence and confusion as it wondered, "Mom, aren't you happy for me?"

Though many years had passed, he still had a profound impression of this public service ad.

The idea that elephants chose not to have tusks to avoid being poached was both heart-wrenching and disheartening.

Moreover, elephants without tusks not only faced inconvenience in drinking and eating, but they also affected other species that depended on elephants for survival.

This intangible impact, who knows how many years it would take to truly manifest.

Lin Hao continued reading, "If the ivory is lost, can it grow back?"

What people commonly refer to as the two long tusks that are visible outside are actually the elephant's incisors. The ones inside the mouth are the molars.

The external part is not everything, one-third of it is enveloped inside the skull.

To obtain ivory, there are only two ways: one is to wait for the elephant to die naturally, and the other is to kill the elephant.

Poachers, in order to get complete tusks, are extremely brutal. After killing an elephant, they cut off its head and trunk to easily extract the tusks. Some elephants are not even fully dead when their tusks are harvested.

Lin Hao thought of the elephants lying on the ground, not yet out of breath, their faces cruelly carved open with an ugly, gaping hole, blood continuously oozing out, their trunks severed and carelessly thrown aside, the tusks removed, leaving behind only the huge decaying body, with flies merrily buzzing amidst the blood and flesh.

Merely the thought of it made him shiver involuntarily and feel a surge of nausea.

In the warehouse of the Kenya Wildlife Service, there was once stored 132 tons of ivory, from 12,000 elephants, most of whom had been killed by poachers. The warehouse was permeated with the smell of blood, unbearable to witness.

After visiting, one person remarked, "The moment you enter, you're hit with the pungent stench of decay, as if seeing piled-up white bones. When you see such a scene, you would never want to buy ivory to display in your home or wear it, because you would feel it's so cruel and ominous."

There was no authoritative data on the number of elephants in the past, but the commonly accepted estimate was that in the 1970s and '80s, the population of African elephants plummeted from 1.3 million to fewer than 500,000, and some reports even suggested fewer than 400,000.

That's equivalent to nearly a hundred elephants dying every day.

The elephant population faced the danger of extinction due to poaching and the ivory trade.

The next question was, should the ivory be destroyed?

One idea was that many African countries had stockpiles of ivory, and destroying them seemed wasteful. If the ivory trade were legalized and there were official channels to sell ivory, would it not combat poaching? Additionally, the money earned from selling ivory could be invested in elephant conservation efforts.

However, ideals are beautiful, but reality is cruel.

After the legal ivory trade was allowed, elephant poaching and black market smuggling actually surged significantly.

The legal trade stimulated consumers' demand for ivory, and the mixture of legal and illegal transactions made law enforcement difficult.

So, later, proposals for legal ivory trade were never approved, and countries around the world had already destroyed 300 tons of their ivory stockpiles.

Embarrassingly, China is the world's largest consumer of ivory, where ivory has become a symbol of wealth and status.

But China is also taking action.

The display sign concluded, "From January 1, 2018, our country has completely halted the processing and sales of ivory and its products and has totally banned the ivory trade. Buying and selling ivory products is illegal.

Only elephants need and have the right to possess ivory!"

After reading the display sign, Lin Hao felt his blood boiling, especially the last sentence, resonating powerfully, as if he couldn't wait to shout it out himself.

Next to him, children were also looking intently at the display sign!

There was a cartoon display prepared for the children at the front, informing them through character dialogues to reject the ivory trade.

An adult said, "Ivory is a symbol of refined taste," to which a child replied, "I prefer them alive."

"The elephant was not killed by me." "Though you didn't kill it, buying ivory is tantamount to supporting the slaughter!"

Having looked over the ivory display, Lin Hao began wandering around the elephant observation hut.

He saw a tourist looking at something behind a door, piqued with curiosity.

Was there a display behind the door as well? Who would see it back there?

After the person left, he also went to take a look.

There was no display sign, just a verse scribbled in charcoal that was crudely written: "Reporters interview with no gain, elephant disasters year after year do remain. When will the edict come, they say, 'To slay the elephant makes a good New Year's Day!'"

Between the lines, a deep hatred for elephants was evident, portraying an oppression by elephants that made it hard to breathe, an air of helplessness to live!

This hatred seemed to leap out from the door itself.

Caught off guard, Lin Hao felt as if he'd been struck by lightning under a clear sky, or as though he'd been hit by a muffled blow.

Instinctively, he looked at another display sign next to him.

The ivory display he had just seen addressed the cruel poaching of beautiful elephants, driven by greedy humans' craving for ivory, while this one detailed the more complex human-elephant conflicts.

It started with some stories about human-elephant conflicts.

In 2015, in Xishuangbanna, a family was playing mahjong with an infant beside them when suddenly an elephant charged towards their house, knocking it down, injuring all four people. Fortunately, someone saw the elephant coming and carried the infant away; otherwise, it's scary to think what might have happened.

Professor Zhang, an authority on elephant research, was in Wild Elephant Valley in Xishuangbanna with his students for a project, during which a hostess in charge of cooking for the students encountered a wild elephant on a rainy day and was trampled to death by it.

Between 1988 and 2016, over 28 years, in places like Xishuangbanna and Pu'er, 68 people were trampled to death by elephants, another 320 were injured by them, and agricultural losses exceeded 30 billion yuan.

For the local villagers, elephants are undoubtedly a hidden danger in their lives. They fear encountering elephants outside, scared that their painstakingly cultivated crops will be destroyed by the wild animals, leaving nothing for harvest. This comic verse was written on the door of a villager's house during Professor Zhang's research visit to Pu'er.

But the tragedy wasn't confined to humans; during this period, 80 elephants were also killed by people.

In 2016, two young elephants passing through a village ate crops sprayed with pesticides and died. The elephant herd lingered for days at the bodies of the two calves, their mourning cries echoing through the valley.

An elephant's gestation period lasts 22 months, producing only one calf per birth with a five- to six-year interval before they can reproduce again. Thus, the herd values and profoundly cares for each young elephant.

The death of the calves left the herd particularly agitated for some time, filled with hostility towards humans and causing considerable panic in the area.

Then there was a family whose wife came out to go to the toilet and encountered an elephant that had entered the yard. Seeing it about to charge, the husband quickly came out, aimed his hunting rifle, and fired a shot at the elephant. The bullet struck the vulnerable spot behind the elephant's ear, killing the female instantly.

The elephant was pregnant, and the herd was infuriated. Fearing retaliation from the herd, the villagers had no choice but to report the incident and got arrested for illegal possession of a firearm.