GPS Trackers In Fake Ivory Tusks Reveal Smuggling Route

Poaching claims 30,000 African elephants every year. Many of their ivory tusks tend to reach "thousands of miles away", says investigative journalist, Bryan Christy. The destruction to the elephant population in Africa is "overwhelming", with 36,000 elephants killed every year through various methods , "using AK-47s, poisoning waterholes, using poison spears, poison arrows."

In order to study the route of the tusks, he asked a taxidermist to make two fake ivory tusks, and embed them with specially designed tracking devices. "These tusks ... operate really like additional investigators, like members of our team, and almost like a robocop," Christy explained.

The route went through highly dense jungle from Garamba National Park into the Central African Republic into South Sudan into Sudan, the Darfur region of Sudan, into a little area called the Kafia Kingi enclave, where Joseph Kony is today. "And there, they told me, "We trade the ivory with Sudanese armed forces. We are trading ivory with the military of Sudan, exchanging it for arms and medicine.," said Christy.

With his team, Christy studied the smugglers who took the tusks north from Congo's Garamba National Park to Sudan. Most tusks are exchanged for arms or medicine in Sudan's Darfur region. Yet, finally, most of the ivory goes to China.

"China is the biggest consumer of illegal ivory. ... Just a few years ago [China] purchased 60 tons of ivory from Africa, and it was that purchase that unleashed the notion that ivory is on the market again," he says.

His breakthrough article about the tracking of the ivory has made it to the cover of the National Geographic Magazine's September 2015 issue as well as the National Geographic Channel documentary, 'Warlords of Ivory'.

Regarding the path of the fake tusks, he said: "We're going to send them into a part of the world where it's too dangerous for us to go. And we inserted them originally on a path we knew to be the path that ivory takes out of Garamba National Park on its way north into Sudan. ... We watched it go from country to country north. It was extremely exciting to watch this idea, this creative idea, could we do it, march north, avoiding all roads as it moved north toward Sudan."

The main transformation in the ivory trade would be brought about if China stops the demand for ivory, making the game collapse economically, so that the price for ivory reduces, he said.