James Baker Wants Trump Admin To Lead International Coalition To Save Elephants
Former Reagan Secretary of State James Baker has been known to do a little big game hunting. However, he draws the line at hunting elephants, a rare redeeming quality in a man who has steeped himself in partisan politics for decades.
So Baker exercised his statesman emeritus status on Fareed Zakaria GPS to ask his counterpart in the incoming Trump administration (presumably he means Rex Tillerson, though he didn't name him directly) to take a lead in creating an international coalition to ban the ivory trade and prevent the hunting of elephants.
It's needed. In 2014, National Geographic was warning of the dangers:
Ivory-seeking poachers have killed 100,000 African elephants in just three years, according to a new study that provides the first reliable continent-wide estimates of illegal kills. During 2011 alone, roughly one of every twelve African elephants was killed by a poacher.
In central Africa, the hardest-hit part of the continent, the regional elephant population has declined by 64 percent in a decade, a finding of the new study that supports another recent estimate developed from field surveys.