Leeds Nurse Packs Trunk For Anti-Poaching March
A Leeds nurse is dressing as an elephant and ‘migrating’ to Merseyside to join a march to save the species.
Dawn Scholes, who works at Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust, will join others to take part in the Global March for Elephants and Rhinos on Saturday 3rd October in Liverpool.
It's the third annual march - with others taking place in Edinburgh, Exeter and London and across the world.
Figures say that an elephant is killed for its ivory every 15 minutes, and if the decline is not reversed the species could be extinct in a few years. Over 35,000 elephants and 1,000 rhinos die annually at the hands of poachers, fuelled by the illegal trade in ivory and rhino horn.
Dawn became interested in elephants after reading a tragic news story about a family of 12 that were shot in Kenya in a poaching frenzy in 2013.
She says,
“The more I read, I realised that the whole situation is tragic, senseless and heart-wrenching. 96 elephants are being brutally slaughtered every day – that is 35,000 every year. The big tuskers and the matriarchs are the prime targets, leaving their families in utter disarray.”
“For me what makes it so tragic is that elephants are so human-like. They have incredibly strong family bonds and mourn their dead. Females stay together with their families for their whole lives. Yet they are living in terror on a daily basis, with around 10% of their kind being massacred every year. I can only begin to imagine how this must affect them. They face extinction in potentially as little as 10 years from now, and the situation facing rhinos is equally tragic.
“I march because I treasure elephants for themselves, not their tusks – which belong to them alone. It would be absolutely tragic for them to become extinct due human greed and stupidity.”