Indlovu Gin is a new spirit infused with elephant dung. Gives new meaning to the term "shit-faced." It sells for about $32 per bottle. Creators Les and Paula Ansley of Mossel Bay, South Africa, came up with the concept on safari after learning that elephants have a varied diet of plants, fruits, and vegetables but less than half of it is actually digested.

“As a consequence, in the elephant dung, you get the most amazing variety of these botanicals,” Les Ansley told the Associated Press. “(I recall my wife saying) Why don’t we let the elephants do the hard work of collecting all these botanicals and we will make gin from it?"

From the AP:

After about five sizeable bags of dung are collected for a batch of 3,000 to 4,000 bottles of the gin, the droppings are dried and crumbled, then washed to remove dirt and sand. Eventually only the remains of the fruits, flowers, leaves and bark eaten by the elephants are left behind.

Those botanicals are then sterilized and dried again and placed in an airing cupboard. Think of it like a “spice cupboard,” Ansley said. Eventually, the remains are infused in the gin.

(via Fark) Read the rest

Four years ago, there were 15 known black rhinos left in Tanzania -- "ground zero of the poaching crisis" -- and today there 167 of them; elephant populations (which dropped 60% between 2009-2014) are rebounding too, up to over 60,000 from a low of 43,330. Read the rest

A suspected rhino poacher in South Africa's Kruger National Park was killed by an elephant and then eaten by lions.

After the elephant attack, police said, "his accomplices claimed to have carried his body to the road so that passersby could find it in the morning. They then vanished from the Park."

"Indications found at the scene suggested that a pride of lions had devoured the remains leaving only a human skull and a pair of pants," the statement said.

From CNN:

Three individuals who joined the illegal hunt were arrested Wednesday by the South African Police Service, and officers continue to investigate what happened.

The suspects appeared in Komatipoort Magistrate Court on Friday to face charges of possessing firearms and ammunition without a license, conspiracy to poach and trespassing.

Of special concern is the black rhino, which is considered critically endangered after its population tumbled from about 65,000 to 1970 to 2,400 in 1995, according to Kruger National Park. Conservation efforts have boosted their numbers, and the world's remaining 5,000 or so black rhinos live predominantly in South Africa, Namibia, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

Peng Shepherd's The Book of M delivers the confusion and frustration of massive world change by playing on the strings of your heart. Read the rest

About 90% of elephants living in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park were slaughtered for their tusks by poachers during Mozambique's 15-year civil war that ended in 1992. The poachers then profited by selling the tusks to finance weapons. As a result, we're now seeing a growing population of elephants in the country born without tusks. Tuskless females, for instance, have jumped from 2%-4% of the population to around 33%.

According to National Geographic:

Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a third of younger females—the generation born after the war ended in 1992—never developed tusks. Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants.

Decades ago, some 4,000 elephants lived in Gorongosa, says Joyce Poole—an elephant behavior expert and National Geographic Explorer who studies the park’s pachyderms. But those numbers dwindled to triple digits following the civil war. New, as yet unpublished, research she’s compiled indicates that of the 200 known adult females, 51 percent of those that survived the war—animals 25 years or older—are tuskless. And 32 percent of the female elephants born since the war are tuskless.

Sadly, this isn't the only population of elephants losing their numbers – and their tusks – to poachers. In South Africa, "fully 98 percent of the 174 females in Addo Elephant National Park were reportedly tuskless in the early 2000s."

Used to defend themselves, as well as for digging, protecting their trunk, and helping them strip bark from trees in order to eat, tusks are enlarged incisor teeth that are essential to their daily well-being. Read the rest

You look like you could use a baby elephant video. Read the rest

Science writer Ed Yong has an amazing whodunit at The Atlantic on how genetic science can help stop elephant poaching. Read the rest

If you see an elephant on the road and do anything but breathe, you're gonna have a bad day. Read the rest

Stephen Kohn, a highpowered whistleblower lawyer (he repped both Linda Tripp and the UBS Leaks whistleblower) showed Wired his heretofore confidential SEC complaint against Facebook, which details the undercover sting operations undertaken by his clients to investigate Facebook's role as a platform for the illegal trade in the remains of endangered species, such as rhino horn, elephant tusks, and lion claws. Read the rest

A baby elephant is trapped in a ditch in Kerala, India until a group of people rescue it with an earth mover. Watch the magical moment when, after the baby elephant makes its way back to its family, who is waiting for it by a river, one of the adult elephants (its mother or father?) turns to the humans and twice gives them a thankful salute. Read the rest

Artist Cindy Chin described her process of carving three elephants in the lead of a carpenter's pencil.

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Moyo the baby elephant was saved From drowning when he was only four days old. His rescuers delivered him to Roxy, a woman who rehabilitates wild animals. As the baby elephant has grown, he has become something of a nuisance in the house. He grabs things off kitchen counters, knocks over plants, sticks spoons in his mouth, and pees on the floor. Roxy is very patient with Moyo. Read the rest

The power of simple animation can be overwhelming. This film, I Will Always Remember You by Hugo Guinness, done for The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, is shattering.

The technique used by artist Hugo Guinness appears to be a tribute to Windsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, the first animated character (in 1914) generally credited as having a personality. It is used here not for whimsy, but artfully to devastating effect. So many emotions conveyed by so few lines.

Sometimes the simplest things are the most effective.

For a mere $50, you can foster a young elephant.

From The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust:

Every orphan of poaching once had a family. As Hugo Guinness’ moving animation shows, at our Nursery, we offer hope, a future and a second chance at life to victims of the ivory trade. This is their story.

‪#‎RememberMe‬ - Please share this film far and wide! Survivors, like the orphan elephant in the film, have the opportunity to not only live, but to go on and start their own families back in the wild.

Want to be a part of their future? Foster an orphaned baby elephant in our care.

Our biggest thanks to acclaimed artist Hugo Guinness, Allegra Pilkington and Luisa Crosbie for creating such a powerful animation, with original music by Joe Trapanese and support from J. Crew.

There may be as few as 2400 Sumatran elephants still alive on the planet. One of their tame brethren, who worked with humans to protect wild ones from being killed, was killed on Friday--apparently for his tusks. Indonesian authorities today described the incident as a “murder and a theft,” and called for a criminal investigation. Read the rest

National Geographic reporter Bryan Christy commissioned two fake elephant tusks embedded with GPS, then planted them to track ivory smuggling routes from the Central African Republic into Sudan. Read the rest

Filmed at Kruger National Park in South Africa. [Video Link] Read the rest

A recent study investigated the impact of culling and relocation on elephant decision-making and cognition decades later. African elephants are highly intelligent and social creatures, and rely on their sophisticated communication skills to survive in the wild. How does the trauma of being separated from "loved ones" and their native terrain change how orphaned elephants think, and cope?

From a recent National Geographic article by Christy Ullrich Barcus: Read the rest