Photo of the Day: Ivory Crush in Times Square

I didn’t catch the major event later in the day, but on Friday morning on the way to work, I saw these tables –and cameras being set up—for Ivory Crush in Times Square. In a dramatic demonstration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crushed a ton of ivory. Most of this had been seized during undercover operations in Philadelphia and New York—the latter of which has the dubious distinction of maintaining ties to this trade.

How dubious is this trade? The best estimate, in a study in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), is that more than 100,000 elephants were poached from 2011 to 2014. Or, think of it this way: an average of 34,000 elephants killed each day across the African continent.