As Dallas Zoo hosts Toss the Tusk, Dallasites do their part to stop wildlife trafficking

You may think there isn’t much you can do to combat poaching. After all, how can you, a Texan, stop shadowy poachers from hunting elephants thousands of miles away in Africa?

Through programs at the Dallas Zoo, there are ways you can help. The United States is a major hub for wildlife trafficking, and Dallas is the fourth-largest U.S. city for illegal wildlife and wildlife product trade activity.

On Friday, the zoo hosted Toss the Тusk, an event in which people can surrender illegal-to-sell wildlife products like elephant ivory and tiger skin rugs to get them off the streets and, over time, shrink the market for the products of poaching and wildlife trafficking. The event collected 28 items, mostly ivory trinkets and heirlooms.

“There are lots of good people out there who don’t want their ivory to be sold and support this trafficking, poaching market. So we wanted to help those people … get rid of that ivory and get it taken out of the cycle,” Chris Corpus, the zoo’s director of conservation, told The Dallas Morning News. “Our hope is that the more ivory that gets removed from the cycle of illegal sale, then the less profit there can be and the less that people have to sell.”

The Dallas Zoo is part of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Wildlife Trafficking Alliance, which has put on Toss the Tusk events since 2019. This is the first year the Dallas Zoo has hosted one, and it’s the last stop in the 2023 series after events held at zoos in San Diego, St. Louis and Oakland, Calif. The event featured education booths outside the the zoo where people could surrender products and a press conference by the elephant enclosure with appearances by representatives from the zoo, the Association of Zoos, U.S. Fish and Wildlife and Texas Parks and Wildlife.

Since its inception, the series has collected over 1,000 wildlife products, according to Sara Walker, Association of Zoos’ senior adviser on Wildlife Trafficking, including the items collected in Dallas.

The Wildlife Trafficking Alliance works with U.S. Fish and Wildlife to put on Toss the Tusk, and the relinquished products are sent to the agency’s National Wildlife Property Repository in Colorado. The repository stores about 1.4 million items for use in public education, law enforcement training and research.

Elephant ivory is the most common product surrendered at Toss the Tusk events, according to Walker, along with some walrus ivory and other miscellaneous animal products like a seal-skin purse on display at the booth. Nationwide, it’s hard to know what the most commonly trafficked products are.

“I can’t really say what the most trafficked species is, because we often see trends, right?” Victoria Owens, U.S. Fish and Wildlife special agent in charge for the southwest, said Friday. “This year, it may be ivory, the next year, it may be chimpanzees, who knows. And we monitor the trends and do proactive, investigative work.”

A common misconception is that all ivory is illegal to sell, but ivory is a broad category of material coming from the tusks and teeth of many different animals. Inspectors from U.S. Fish and Wildlife explained that warthog ivory isn’t regulated, and it is legal for Alaska Natives to sell walrus ivory.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife inspectors can often tell the difference between types of ivory, and thus their legality, because of their training. Allison Frank, one of the inspectors, demonstrated how to tell walrus and elephant ivory apart by their cross sections: walrus ivory has a visible oatmeal-like core and elephant ivory has a crosshatch pattern around its edge.

Wildlife trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry supported by cartels and terrorist organizations, Corpus said, but education remains a powerful tool for conservation organizations to combat the trade. Poaching rates have been slowly but steadily declining across Africa, where most poached elephants are, over the past few years, according to Walker, and zoos like Dallas provide invaluable opportunities for the public to engage with conservation.

“About a million people come through the Dallas Zoo every year, and that is just a small part of the Dallas-Fort Worth population, but those million people are connected to millions more,” Corpus said. “And so our hope is that through the education efforts that our team does,…that we can then get people to build some empathy and hopefully learn how they can help take action to stop wildlife trafficking.”