BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Elephants and Us: Considering Extinction

DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Elephants and Us: Considering Extinction:

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Description of Pictures: Elephants and Us: Considering Extinction
November 1, 2019 – September 13, 2020
Marking the 30th anniversary of the historic African Elephant Conservation Act, Elephants and Us explores Americans’ relationship with elephants as it has evolved over centuries from one of exploitation to stewardship, and the leadership role the United States has taken in wildlife protection. The African elephant is the largest land animal in the world and is now subject to unsustainable levels of illegal killing and trade practices. This exhibition features the opening and signature pages from the 1988 African Elephant Conservation Act, on loan from the National Archives and Records Administration.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. ELEPH_191101_007.JPG: Elephants have long captivated American imaginations. But our popular conceptions of elephants often conceal our deadly desire for their tusks.
2. ELEPH_191101_009.JPG: Elephants and the Smithsonian: Considering Culture and Conservation Across the Smithsonian today, we acquire and maintain collections that help us better understand elephants as well as the significance of ivory across human history. We are committed to the conservation of Earth's biodiversity and to preserving global cultural heritage. Want to learn more? Visit Game Change: Elephants from Prey to Preservation, a Smithsonian Libraries exhibit door at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, now through February 1, 2020.
3. ELEPH_191101_018.JPG: Children's book, 1949 American ivory company worker with piano keys, around 1930s-1940s Elephant mascot on baseball program, 1949
4. ELEPH_191101_020.JPG: American ivory company worker with piano keys, around 1930s-1940s
5. ELEPH_191101_033.JPG: Theodore Roosevelt posing with an elephant he shot in Africa, 1909
6. ELEPH_191101_043.JPG: Ivory Expensive Luxury Americans have desired elephant ivory since the colonial era. For thousands of years, people all over the world valued ivory objects made from elephant tusks. Americans were no exception. But in the new United States, only the wealthy few could afford products made of ivory. Hunting elephants, shipping tusks from Africa and Asia, and turning tusks into finished goods in Europe and the United States was an expensive enterprise. Elephants were killed to meet the demand for the tusks in this period, but in low enough numbers to avoid the threat of extinction.
7. ELEPH_191101_049.JPG: What is Elephant Ivory? We tend to use the term "ivory" to describe a precious material, often without considering that ivory is taken from animals. When we talk about "ivory," we're actually talking about teeth. In the case of elephants, we're talking about a certain kid of teeth: tusks. Those are the long upper incisors of elephants that grow deep within their skulls.
8. ELEPH_191101_057.JPG: "The Elephant is the largest, the strongest, the most sagacious, and the longest-lived of all the brute creation. The species is numerous, does not decrease, and is dispersed over all of the southern parts of Asia and Africa." -- Middlesex Gazette of Connecticut, 1796
9. ELEPH_191101_060.JPG: Folding fan and hair comb, around 1800 These ivory objects are associated with former First Ladies Abigail Adams and Louisa Catherine Adams. Fans were essential accessories to a well-off woman's wardrobe. Elaborate combs, also made of ivory, secured and decorated hairstyles. Flute, around 1800 Ivory was a choice material for parts of musical instruments because it was attractive, durable, and easy to shape. This flute made of ivory cost more than wooden versions. Portrait of Sidney Mason, U.S. Consul in Puerto Rico, around 1830 Miniature portraits on ivory were luxuries from the late 1700s until the introduction of photography around 1840. Throughout this period, white skin symbolized power -- and the surface qualities of ivory captured that shade without paint.
10. ELEPH_191101_081.JPG: Elephants + the Idea of Extinction Elephants helped establish a new way of thinking about life and death of species on Earth. Strange fossils dug from American soil looked elephant-like in some ways and different in others. Two hundred years ago, French naturalist Georges Cuvier compared these fossils with elephant bones. He determined that the fossils were from another species he ultimate named the mastodon, and concluded it was "lost" in the past. These observations led him to a bold idea: species could go extinct.
11. ELEPH_191101_092.JPG: Mastodon teeth from Big Bone Lick These baby mastodon teeth come from Big Bone Lick, near the Ohio River in Kentucky. It is the same location where Native Americans found the mastodon fossils that would make their way to France. Cuvier relied on another import from the Americas to develop his idea of extinction: he gathered Native American accounts stating that the mastodon no longer existed.
12. ELEPH_191101_095.JPG: Solving a great fossil mystery
13. ELEPH_191101_104.JPG: Elephants and Us Considering Extinction
14. ELEPH_191101_116.JPG: Ivory Manufactured Luxury
15. ELEPH_191101_124.JPG: Hand-cut comb, around 1840 Comb box label, around 1850 Machine-made comb, around 1890 Craftsmen cut combs by hand, until in the 1790s inventor Phineas Pratt of Connecticut created a way to saw combs with a machine that saved time and labor. This effort helped transform the Lower Connecticut River Valley into the U.S. ivory center by the Civil War.
16. ELEPH_191101_132.JPG: Unloading tusks at factory in Ivoryton, Connecticut, 1890 The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gradually made it faster and cheaper to import tusks from a range of ports in Indian and Europe rather than directly from East Africa. Tusks arrived from abroad in New York, then moved by smaller ships to Essex, Connecticut, and finally overland by wagons like this one to the ivory factories of the Connecticut River Valley.
17. ELEPH_191101_140.JPG: Trading in tusks in East Africa, around 1900
18. ELEPH_191101_142.JPG: Cotton sheeting, 1904 In the 1830s the cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, began to supply plain undyed cloth to markets in East Africa. Known as merekani or amerikani in Swahili, this type of cloth was exported in large quantities for decades, and was a valuable medium of exchange for elephant tusks in the interior of East Africa.
19. ELEPH_191101_158.JPG: Five-dollar banknote, 1854 Dating from the days when local banks issued their own currency, this banknote featuring elephants reflects how crucial the ivory trade was to Connecticut's economy.
20. ELEPH_191101_167.JPG: Ivory for billiard balls Ivory's strength made it ideal for billiard balls, but manufacturing them called for huge quantities of elephant tusks. Balls had to come from the center of a tusk in order to roll straight, so no more than give came from any one tusk. Because heat and humidity made balls lopsided over time, they were shaved down regularly and discarded once they were smaller than two inches.
21. ELEPH_191101_173.JPG: Celluloid billiard ball, around 1868, and box for Bakelite billiard balls, around 1910 In 1863, a billiard hall owner concerned about the "dreadfully dear" price of ivory balls offered a prize for the invention of an ivory substitute. The competition led to the invention of celluloid, a plastic made in part from natural cellulose. Celluloid proved useful for countless products, but it was not as stable or hard as ivory. Later synthetic plastics such as Bakelite, combined with ivory's climbing price as elephant populations declined, spelled the end of ivory billiard balls.
22. ELEPH_191101_192.JPG: "What a number of poor beasts have died for this ivory!" -- British Army Colonial Charles George Gordon, October 1875
23. ELEPH_191101_199.JPG: Steps to manufacture piano key veneers from elephant ivory tusk, 1893 Advancements in making pianos made the instruments more affordable, just as the middle class that could newly afford them was expanding. Hundreds of thousands of pianos were made and sold between 1850 and 1930 -- and elephant ivory covered the white keys.
24. ELEPH_191101_210.JPG: Intercept: Seized ivory, around 2014 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents seized these ivory elephant objects smuggled into the United States.
25. ELEPH_191101_213.JPG: Inspect; Sniffing out illegal ivory, 2017 The United States and some other countries use dogs to combat smugglers. This dog inspects for ivory at an airport in Sudan, a critical hub for traffickers. The U.S. African Elephant Conservation Fund funded this program.
26. ELEPH_191101_218.JPG: Rifle presented to Theodore Roosevelt, 1909 In recognition of his conservation work, a group of British zoologists and sportsmen gave Theodore Roosevelt this rifle for his African expedition with a note praising "his services on behalf of the preservation of species by means of national parks and forest reserves, and by other means." Roosevelt remarked on the gun's beauty and called it "the best weapon for heavy game."
27. ELEPH_191101_222.JPG: "[W]ild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day, but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squadron..." -- Theodore Roosevelt, 1915
28. ELEPH_191101_253.JPG: Conservation Our Responsibility Theodore Roosevelt popularized the idea that conservation was the nation's responsibility.
29. ELEPH_191101_261.JPG: Theodore Roosevelt speaking at Yellowstone National Park, 1903 At a dedication ceremony, Theodore Roosevelt proudly declared that "the wild creatures of the park are scrupulously preserved" at Yellowstone.
30. ELEPH_191101_286.JPG: Crushed ivory, 2015, and contraband elephant tusk, date unknown
31. ELEPH_191101_293.JPG: "Every time someone buys an ivory bracelet, earrings, or some other trinket, they should realize that they are helping to put an elephant in his grave." -- Wildlife conservationist Oria Douglas-Hamilton, 1980
32. ELEPH_191101_297.JPG: "There is a lusciousness to the touch and feel of ivory, a smooth coolness, a purity. ... I feed on it, I hunger for it, I can't get enough of it." -- Ivory collector Dr. Samuel A. Schneidman, 1977
33. ELEPH_191101_307.JPG: Earrings, 1986 Ivory products have continued to attract American buyers. The African Elephant Conservation Act of 1988 reduced the production of goods like these earrings in the United States. A stricter ban in 2016 on imports, exports, and interstate domestic trade of elephant ivory further constrained -- but has not eliminated -- Americans' ability to fulfill their desire for ivory goods made elsewhere.
34. ELEPH_191101_314.JPG: Illegal ivory, late 1900s These items are among the thousands of illegal wildlife and related products that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors have intercepted at nearly forty U.S. ports of entry.
35. ELEPH_191101_320.JPG: Ivory Illegal Luxury
36. ELEPH_191101_328.JPG: Investigate: Fighting ivory trafficking with forensics
37. ELEPH_191101_363.JPG: Conservation Our Law A U.S. law commits us to protecting wild African elephants.
38. ELEPH_191101_370.JPG: What About Asian Elephants?
39. ELEPH_191101_376.JPG: "The United States has been given by fate and history the responsibility of taking a lead role with respect to the preservation and protection of species not only in this country but across the world." -- Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA)
40. ELEPH_191101_423.JPG: Elephants and Us Considering Extinction
41. ELEPH_191101_427.JPG: Conservation Our Science As wild populations decline, the science of elephant reproduction is on the rise.
42. ELEPH_191101_430.JPG: Elephant genome, 2018
43. ELEPH_191101_433.JPG: National Zoo elephants, 1988
44. ELEPH_191101_441.JPG: Elephant toy, 2018
45. ELEPH_191101_442.JPG: Newsletter announcing elephant pregnancy, 2000 In 1991, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute physiologist Dr. Janine Brown made a discovery that improved how we breed elephants. Most mammals have one surge of a specific hormone, called a luteinizing hormone, that triggers the release of an egg for fertilization. But Brown showed that elephants have two surges of the hormone, about three weeks apart, before ovulation. The National Zoo adjusted the timing of its breeding efforts, which enabled Shanthi (pictured with Dr. Brown) to become pregnant in 2000.
46. ELEPH_191101_457.JPG: Sign from Smithsonian DNA lab, 2018
47. ELEPH_191101_460.JPG: Spectrophotometer, 2010-2015
48. ELEPH_191101_477.JPG: Elephant collar with GPS tracking device, around 2014
49. ELEPH_191101_479.JPG: Elephants + the Reality of Extinction
50. ELEPH_191101_488.JPG: Estimated numbers of African and Asian elephants, 2016
51. ELEPH_191101_494.JPG: Americans have a role to play in preserving Earth's largest land mammals.
52. ELEPH_191101_500.JPG: "Gradually the elephants came here to Tapeguhe. They crossed our area, our territory, all the time, devastating our plantations, our fields, to such an extent that it really affected our ability to eat." -- Ibo Nahonain, village chief of Tapeguhe, Cote d'Ivoire, 2014
53. ELEPH_191101_505.JPG: Relocating elephants, 2014
54. ELEPH_191101_509.JPG: Human-Elephant Conflict Mitigation Field Guide, 2013 It is not easy to live near elephants. Big and dangerous, they can cause serious damage to crops and human property. They can kill people. To reduce these encounters, the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society produced this brochure to warn locals about how to behave around elephants. The brochure also proved useful in Africa.
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