ElephantVoices

Dear WD Visitor!

For those of you living in the US: Sandip Roy Chowdhury will be talking with Joyce Poole on “New America Now: Dispatches from the New Majority,” which airs Friday Nov 14th at 1:00 p.m. and repeats Sunday at 3:00 p.m. on KALW, 91.7 FM.

You can hear an interview with Joyce on AnimalVoices, an alternative radio in Vancouver, here. The interview with Karl Losken was aired on 31st October.

At 4 am this morning we were awoken by two alarm clocks – not wanting to risk that one would let us down. A couple of hours later we departed for our two week event and fundraising tour in California. We’re looking forward to see friends, elephant supporters and even elephants (at PAWS, where we have a joint event on Saturday 15th Nov.), while at the same time experience the excitement of an historical election. With strong roots in Kenya (and plenty of other good reasons, too) no-one should be surprised that we are happy that Barack Obama will soon be the new President of the United States of America. We are among those convinced that he will strengthen America in a way that will be good for everyone. Barack is Kiswahili for blessing and he is indeed a blessing.

Waiting at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam for our next flight, we watched another BBC news piece describing the impact of increased ivory poaching on the world’s biggest land mammal – and expressing fears that the recent ivory auctions, sanctioned by CITES, will stimulate that growing threat. More and more elephants are succumbing to poaching fueled by the ivory trade and the press needs to bring this to the world’s attention.

Despite difficult times for the financial markets around the world, and for most of us as a consequence, we are hopeful that the people we meet during our California tour will continue to support our elephant conservation work. In the coming year we will be devoting a large portion of our time to our elephant conservation project in Sri Lanka.

We are also very grateful for any contributions towards our work from WildlifeDirect visitors!

Best wishes, Petter and Joyce

As many of you have seen and know, Joyce and I will be visiting California from 6 to 20 November. Together with friends, supporters and collaborators we’re holding several fundraisers, as you will see from the linked event overview. The timing is, admittedly, a bit more exciting than we planned – considering the global financial unrest. The election of a new US President a couple of days before our arrival may trigger some new optimism, though, which could be good for all of us, including elephants…

We lean towards a statement from one of our SF friends: At this stage it is much better to think about elephants than finances! And what we do know is that elephants need us more than ever – and even more so because of what may follow this economical downturn.

If you would like more information about our work don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re currently doing a major revision of elephantvoices.org, and hope to launch the new version during December after some unfortunate delays. During the next few months the site will be expanded in ways that we believe many of you will like and find interesting, especially if you enjoy the voices of elephants. It will also include interactive information about our new elephant conservation project in Sri Lanka. Another of our goals is to improve how you can access and subscribe to our news. Please be patient while we are preparing the changes!

We hope you will follow the work of ElephantVoices in the years to come – it would be great to see you in person during our upcoming fundraising tour!

Best wishes, Petter