Actor Elizabeth Hurley travelled to Nairobi from London a few weeks ago to witness the Kenyan government burn 105 tons of poached ivory, saying she “felt sickened to watch the great pyres.”
Lupita Nyong’o, the Oscar-winning actor, posed with a baby elephant rescued from a poacher’s snare, telling her 2.6 million Instagram followers: “33,000 elephants are killed every year so that a few people can wear and display a few trinkets. We can do better.”
Susan Sarandon raised thousands for an elephant benefit in London last year. “The crisis facing elephants is particularly tragic,” she said recently. “Everything about them is extraordinary,” she said. “Their intelligence and emotional complexity, the depth of their matriarchal social ties and just their sheer physical majesty.”
Hashtag pachydermsThese days, it seems, for every elephant that falls to poachers, a celebrity rises to join the fight to save them.
#SaveTheElephants has become a rallying cry among the celebrity class, a made-for-Hollywood issue that features a beloved victim, menacing villains (gangsters, warlords) and undeniable drama (if current poaching rates continue, wild elephant populations could vanish in some African countries, conservationists say).
No wonder elephant conservation, like the rain forest in the 1990s, has become an issue that celebrities can rally behind, uniting stars of the big screen (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Edward Norton) and small (Ian Somerhalder of The Vampire Diaries ), not to mention sports stars (Yao Ming, Andy Murray), fashion designers (Tommy Hilfiger, Diane von Furstenberg) and royals (the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and Kate Middleton).
The cause célèbre, in other words, has become a cause celeb.
“Stars are magnets, and they attract other stars,” said Laura Fredricks, a philanthropy consultant and lecturer at New York University. “And before you know it, the whole celebrity scene is totally on board with saving elephants around the world. It’s the sexy cause of the moment.”
There is no denying that the stakes are high. As of 2013, the elephant population in Africa had plummeted to about 400,000, according to the conservation site elephantdatabase.org, from some 1.3 million in 1979, due to strong demand for ivory, particularly in Asia.
The U.S. remains a leading market. Despite a long-standing ban on commercial importation, allowances for legal ivory — such as in antiques — create loopholes for ivory from poached elephants to enter the market, activists say.
“What I’m seeing now is a lot of anger,” said Andrew Harmon, a spokesman for WildAid, a global conservation group based in San Francisco. “People are just really afraid that this will be a generation that will see elephants go extinct in the wild.”
Given the climate, conservationists have embraced celebrities’ amplification of their message, said Misty Herrin, a spokeswoman for the Nature Conservancy.
Conservationists’ supportLast November, the Wildlife Conservation Society cast Arnold Schwarzenegger to star in a promotional video for its 96 Elephants campaign. Acting Terminator-tough and posing in front of an U.S. Army tank, the human action figure barked, “Hey, stop killing 96 elephants every day just because of this ivory.” The video generated 1.4 million views across various channels and more than 80,000 letters to support legislative action.
Similarly, Edward Norton appeared in a chilling 2014 public service announcement for WildAid, in partnership with Save the Elephants and the African Wildlife Foundation, titled Party , which cuts between a cocktail party filled with ivory objects and sneering traffickers, and footage of elephants being shot down by bullets.
“If you buy elephant ivory, you may be part of a criminal gang, " the actor says in the video. “And because you’re paying them, that makes you the boss.” — New York Times News Service
