Twenty children from the English School Foundation’s Clearwater Bay School have presented an elephant collage petition to the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department at Cheung Sha Wan.
The elephant was made up of 120 handwritten messages contributed by all of the six-year-old pupils at the school.
Chanting “Say no to ivory!” the children called on the government to legislate for a complete ban on commercial sales of elephant ivory in Hong Kong.
It is currently illegal to import or export ivory from Hong Kong without a licence. Also in attendance was WildAid’s Alex Hofford who recently came to the school to give a talk about elephant conservation. WildAid claims to be the only organisation to focus solely on reducing the demand for wildlife products. “Hong Kong has long been a hub for the illegal ivory trade, and suffers from weak ivory licensing controls. The only way to sort out the problem is to ban the trade outright,” he said.
WildAid states that the Hong Kong government’s inaction on this issue is perpetuating a modern day elephant poaching crisis and African elephants could become extinct in the wild within our lifetime if current poaching rates continue.
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