To: CITES Secretary General Ivonne Higuero and Member Nations,

Greetings,

The earth and its creatures, human and animal are at a crossroads; climate change is upon us, as is the escalating loss of wild places; droughts, floods and dwindling habitat are imposing hitherto unimagined stresses on the last remain populations of iconic wild animals, cornering them into increasingly smaller fragments of degraded wilderness. In this climate CITES must reject the call by member nations to assign wild creatures a designation that dismisses their sentience, their culture, their history, their splendor and their plight. They are not a “product”; they are fellow travelers who share our earth:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” – The Outermost House

We call on CITES to:

1. Exempt all animals listed on Appendix I and II from trophy hunting and trade in their body parts and live animals.

2. Demand that Japan and the EU close down their domestic ivory trade.

3. Ban animals with Appendix I and II status from captive breeding; their body parts/bones fuel the illegal wildlife trade and the demand for endangered species.

4. Vote in favour of proposals to uplist elephants to Appendix I and giraffes to Appendix II.

5. Reject proposals by certain SADC countries to re-open trade in ivory and other elephant body parts and in rhino horn.

6. Establish greater transparency in CITES’ issuing of permits, specifically permits for hunting trophies and export of live endangered species.

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The mission of Global March for Elephants and Rhinos (GMFER) is to #MarchAgainstExtinction and demand that world leaders take action to STOP the poaching of elephants and rhinos and to END the trade in ivory and rhino horn.