The Ivory War

It wasn't so long ago, from 1970 to 1990, that nearly half the elephants in Africa, about 700,000, were slaughtered. Then, the species was saved by the world ban on the ivory trade. Since then elephants have done well in southern Africa. But in a different region, that knows no law, the hunt for elephants is on again.

In central Africa, where almost no one is looking, 60 Minutes ran into an ivory war.

But it's the start of the wet season, and water is luring them out of the protection of the reserve and into danger.

"This is like a refugee camp. And everything else around it for hundreds of kilometers, hundreds of miles has been exterminated," Mike Fay, a world-renowned biologist working with the Wildlife Conservation Society and National Geographic, explains.

"A refugee camp for elephants?" Pelley asks.

"Yeah. Basically," Fay says. "It's the only place left with wildlife."

Zakouma lies in central Africa. About 150 miles away is Darfur. Soldiers, rebels and bandits prey on ivory to fund their operations and satisfy their greed.

Fay came to Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer nearly 30 years ago. He's an explorer and naturalist who has made an alarming discovery. He spent two years counting Zakouma elephants from the air.

In his 2005 elephant survey, Fay says he counted 3,885 elephants.

The following year, there were only 3,050 elephants. "So we lost 835 elephants. Most elephants that die in Africa, the vast majority of them die prematurely at the hands of man," he says.

He proved it last year, capturing pictures of elephants killed only hours before. The poachers were still there. One man was even photographed shooting at Fay's plane.

"They always want more. So if they get ten elephants, they want 100. If they get 100, they want 1,000. And they won't stop until every single elephant is dead unless they meet resistance," Fay.

Resistance to poaching comes from Chadian park rangers, some of the toughest men we've found anywhere. There are 80 of them, mostly on horseback, patrolling the 1,200 square miles of the Zakouma refuge. The chief ranger is Nicola Talua.

"Most of your men are armed with AK-47s, this guy has a rocket propelled grenade, this guy up here has a machine gun mounted on his truck. This looks more like a war to me," Pelley points out.

"We have to be ready for war and stop the killing of elephants. The poachers wear no uniforms. They come here and open fire. In the face of such behavior, we are at war," Talua explains.

Pelley rode with the rangers to the scene of a recent battle. Two weeks before the rangers came upon poachers as they were hacking out the tusks.

"The smell is overwhelming. Here's one, two, three, four, five, six, looks like seven right here," Pelley notes.

Three rangers were killed in the fight. Thirty three elephants lay dead, their bodies decomposing rapidly in the 110 degree heat.

"This has got to make you angry?" Pelley remarks to a ranger.

"I am here to protect the elephants. When I see one of them lying down, it's like seeing my child hurt on the ground," the ranger replies.

In just the last year and a half, the rangers found 298 dead elephants, nearly ten percent of the refuge population.

"It's like killing a human to extract the gold out of their fillings, you know? That's all they take. And you just think that is so telling of humanity. Where we can destroy this incredibly complex beautiful animal, to take a piece of ivory. To be used for what? To satisfy human vanity," Fay says.

Tusks are elephant teeth: on one end, a tusk is hollow where the root used to be, and solid on the other end. Tusks are pretty substantial, too: a tusk Pelley held weighed about 20 pounds. The poachers are getting $25 a pound, so that a 20 lb. tusk would go for about $500. No wonder they call it white gold. One hundred tusks were laid out in front of Pelley, the tusks of 50 elephants.

Those 100 tusks were just the ones Nicola and his men managed to confiscate in one small district in the last three months.

Who are the poachers? 60 Minutes heard that some of them had been captured recently. And a local police chief took Pelley and the team to see them.

"The police say that you were caught with elephant tusks," Pelley remarked.

"Yeah, for sure," one of the men replied to Pelley through a translator.

"Why did you have them?" Pelley asked.

"They say that they are poor and they were just in need of food," the translator replied.

Asked how many elephants had been killed, the translator said, "In a month, they killed 14 elephants."

"Fourteen elephants in a month? Do you know what happens to the tusks after they are exported from the country? Do you know what becomes of them?" Pelley asked.

"He doesn't know," the translator replied.

He might be amazed to see where ivory goes and how it travels. Last year, a shipping container full of lumber was x-rayed by Hong Kong customs officers. Inside, 605 tusks were hidden behind a false wall. Interpol says that the same company shipped three more containers that got away.

"It's the largest seizure in Hong Kong's history that we know about," says Tom Milliken, who tracks illegal ivory for the international convention that banned the ivory trade in 1989.

Asked how much ivory has been seized, Milliken tells Pelley, "Well, last year, for example, in 2006, more than 25 tons of ivory was seized, according to our data."

"If the international trade in ivory was banned in 1989, why is it a problem again?" Pelley asks.

"Well, since the mid-1990s, the sleeping demand of China has awakened. And with 1.3 billion consumers, we've had an escalating trend in illegal trade in ivory ever since," Milliken explains.

Chinese consumers have more money than ever and ivory is a status symbol. Elephant tusks are being carved into everything from chop sticks to fine art.

"We have evidence of Chinese nationals implicated in ivory seizures or actually arrested in connection with ivory seizures in 22 of the 37 African elephant range states. The scale of illegal trade in ivory which directly implicates China has never been greater," Milliken says.

Milliken says China is trying harder. But illegal ivory is still sold in the open. And at the border, stopping it is like stopping drugs coming into the U.S.

When 60 Minutes arrived in Chad, we wondered if we were too late. We expected to see great herds. But we spotted only a few bulls which travel alone or in twos and threes.

Turns out, it's not so easy to find a few hundred elephants hiding in plain sight. Mike Fay searched by air for days. On the ground, the 60 Minutes team followed their trail. But elephant tracks in the mud are the worst potholes you can imagine.

After a week of this search, a major storm closed in on Fay's plane. At the last minute, he spotted what's rare even in Africa. "We've got about a hundred elephants here. One hundred elephants. And I'm gonna give you a position: 10 degrees, 58 minutes, 11 seconds. And 19 degrees, 51 minutes, zero one seconds," Fay radioed.

"We'll head to that coordinate and we'll contact you when we arrive," Pelley radioed back.

Fay landed ahead of the storm, and the 60 Minutes team ducked under it. A short time later, the rains cleared and we found them

There were more elephants than Fay had estimated -- when elephants huddle in herds this large, it's because they understand there's danger near.

"It's an astonishing sight to be nearly surrounded by this many elephants…there's about 200 of them. Most of them are gonna be females because they are leading the baby elephants through this forage. There are some elephants that I would take to be under two years old, maybe one-year-old and they are arrayed all around us," Pelley said, standing near the herd.

At sunset, the herd was about to move on.

The old matriarch was leading her elephants out of the protective boundaries of the refuge and into the wider savannah now turning green under the rains. The poachers know these seasons too and they're waiting.
Produced By Solly Granatstein and Jenny Dubin