Tiny Boys Butcher Babar

You see that Youtube video from Thailand where an elephant took a paint brush and painted an outlined self-portrait? I’m sure you can find the video. These are bright, feeling creatures.

You Recall the children’s books and movies  Babar the Elephant, Disney’s Dumbo?

I have never liked circuses and I have mixed feelings about zoos.

When the wild is captive, there had better be damned good reasons and the care had better be stellar.

My sense of this, how we treat the wild whose world this really is, is not enhanced when I hear that the National Rifle Association, is lobbying on the sly to allow gun owners to kill Babar, to murder elephants for their ivory, when the president’s sons similarly lobby and win.

Nick Wing in HuffPo tells us that some years back folks watched as a gun lobbyist with his own NRA-sponsored cable program stalked a large African elephant, shot him twice in the face.

The so-called hunter, a strategist for the NRA called Tony Makris, with a sidekick, later toasted one another with champagne, having fled with the animal’s ivory.

The segment was filmed for part of an “Under Wild Skies” show that was later canceled by the NBC Sports Network after garnering far more in international outrage than NBC had expected.  The program showed that a number of African nations still allow hunters to purchase permits — “some 1,000 of which are issued to Americans each year” — to kill elephants from their ever-dwindling populations “amid reports that illegal poaching already claims the lives of up to 35,000 African elephants a year.”

And this hunting isn’t just for so-called sport. It’s also for the elephants’ valuable ivory tusks, trophies American hunters are again permitted to ship back to the United States for non-commercial purposes. Several hundred sport-hunted elephant trophies — including tusks, skins and bones — have been imported into the U.S. each of the past ten years.

Ivory Envy, tiny boys?

Sad, Sad, Very Sad: they suffered when President Obama “restricted the ivory “trade in the U.S., which for years has been its second largest retail market” behind China.

Regulations on ivory imports exercise the NRA and the president’s sons.

The NRA supports a bill whose final sentence is an explicit guarantee: Americans may legally kill elephants for their ivory.

Surely without such a law the emotional devastation to Eric and Junior would be incalculable. 

Now, I loved the Babar and Dumbo Elephant tales.

And the Kipling Mogli stories and perhaps you did, too and have shared them with your kids and grand-kids. 

Know what I don’t love? Phallic-obsessed tiny-boy butchers.