callfromthewild.com

My generation have been born into a world where rhinos and elephants are rare and, unless we drastically alter their trajectory away from extinction, we’ll inherit a world in which rhinos and elephants are merely memories tainted with regret. Yet no statistic will strike you as deeply as ‘The Last Animals’ - a documentary by Kate Brooks that takes an intense, raw and devastating look at the global response to this slaughter and the desperate measures to genetically rescue the Northern White rhinos who are on the edge of extinction. Even if you don’t consider yourself an avid wildlife-lover, this film strips away the impediments of human nature and evaluates our most elemental traits. On the same day that the trailer for The Last Animals was released, China signed a death warrant for two already imperilled creatures that are teetering on the brink of extinction.

A problem that spans continents and species, a problem that results in the deaths of millions of creatures and costs over $19 billion per year. This week I attended the Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference - an important assemblage that could act as a catalyst in combatting the wholesale illegal decimation of wildlife across the globe. This is a lucrative and booming trade that has been allowed to escalate uncontrollably, but we cannot give up, not when we know that today alone, 55 elephants have been slaughtered for their teeth,  rhino killed for their horns, tigers for their bones and pangolins for their scales... This whole trade is based upon the idea that money, a man-made concept, holds more value than the lives of magnificent creatures who greatly enrich our planet.

All of this effort, all of this careful adaptation and adjustment over fourteen million years, only for humans to bulldoze into their homes, leaving trails of acrid smoke and burning flames, simply to  plunder the oil to add texture to our snacks. Destruction of their home has resulted in a scarcity of food available for the orangutan, meaning that they’re enforced to ‘trespass’ onto the land of farmers, where, driven by hunger they steal crops such as the fruit from the Oil Palm tree. This money can be invested in the education of local subsistence farmers and their families, demonstrating to them how vital orangutans are to the ecosystem and the country’s economy  (due to the tourism that they encourage). The remaining money can be used to pay compensation for farmers whose crops are consumed or damaged by the orangutans.

Peter Matthiessen once said that elephants 'command the silence ordinarily reserved for mountains, peaks, great fires, and the sea', however when I gazed into the soulful eyes of these archaic creatures, mountains and oceans almost paled in comparison to the sublime feeling of implicit communication with another species. For the past few weeks I have been travelling around Thailand to document the plight of the Asian elephant and expose the horrific industry that normalises a practice called ‘Phajaan’, which means ‘to break the spirit of an elephant’. Whilst investigating the camps (and filming an exposé), I saw crippled creatures with sores and slashes etched into their bodies. Whilst I stood in the camps filming these horrors, I couldn’t help but feel disgusted as I saw the intelligent eyes of such beautiful creatures watching as throngs of tourists poke and prod them, baying for a selfie.