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Sources

Save The Elephants: Gabon President Ignites Huge Bonfire Of Illicit Ivory

Worldcrunch

LE MONDE (France), NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

GABON - Authorities in Gabon burned more than 4.5 tons of illegal ivory this week after the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species released a report showing that elephant poaching has reached a record high in the past few years.

The year 2011 saw the highest recorded levels of elephant killings since the ivory trade was banned in 1989, according to National Geographic. Some 24.3 tons of ivory were intercepted last year, with most of it destined for China and Thailand, where demand and prices are rising.

Le Monde reports that more than 1,200 raw pieces and 17,000 sculpted pieces of ivory were burned in the bonfire personally lit by Gabonese president Ali Bongo Ondimba on Wednesday, as a gesture to show support for protecting elephants.

The total value of the burned ivory topped 7.6 million euros, and the World Wildlife Fund, which was present at the event, estimated that this represented almost 850 elephants killed.

Gabon is home to approximately 50,000 of the remaining 472,000 to 690,000 African elephants that still live on the continent. Watch the WWF video below of the Gabonese President at the ivory burning explaining his country's position on elephant poaching:

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Ideas

Purebreds To "Rasse" Theory: A German Critique Of Dog Breeding

Just like ideas about racial theory, the notion of seeking purebred dogs is a relatively recent human invention. This animal eugenics project came from a fantasy of recreating a glorious past and has done irreparable harm to canines. A German

Photo of a four dogs, including two dalmatians, on leashes

No one flinches when we refer to dogs, horses or cows as purebreds, and if a friend’s new dog is a rescue, we see no problem in calling it a mongrel or crossbreed.

Wieland Freund

BERLIN — Some words always seem to find a way to sneak through. We have created a whole raft of embargoes and decrees about the term race: We prefer to say ethnicity, although that isn’t always much better. In Germany, we sometimes use the English word race rather than our mother tongue’s Rasse.

But Rasse crops up in places where English native speakers might not expect to find it. If, on a walk through the woods, the park or around town, a German meets a dog that doesn’t clearly fit into a neat category of Labrador, dachshund or Dalmatian, they forget all their misgivings about the term and may well ask the person holding the lead what race of dog it is.

Although we have turned our back on the shameful racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of an “encyclopedia of purebred dogs” or a dog handler who promises an overview of almost “all breeds” (in German, “all races”) has somehow remained inoffensive.

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