OUR NEWS
Hillary Clinton and John Kasich: We cannot cede ground on animal poaching
We plan to take our voices to Capitol Hill to urge lawmakers to support and significantly increase U.S. funding overseas for these efforts. At the same time, we must end the market for wildlife and wildlife parts by confronting ruthless criminal trafficking syndicates and governments whose policies and actions (or inaction) contribute to the senseless slaughter of species threatened by the global trade. This is why we are also working with groups committed to change and protecting wildlife, including the new bipartisan The Elephant Project, in challenging the administration’s policies.
This is an issue that we both have endeavored to shine light on, in and out of office. One of us (Clinton) worked with President Barack Obama to draw attention to African elephant poaching in the 2000s — when close to two-thirds of all remaining forest elephants were wiped out to meet the global demand for ivory — and embraced a strategy in 2013 through the Clinton Global Initiative to stop the killing and trafficking of elephants. The other (Kasich) supported legislation as a nine-term member of Congress to address the crisis and engaged President George W. Bush on the potential for losing the world’s elephants entirely without an international ban on the importation of ivory.
We supported bans on ivory sales in U.S. states with the largest markets — including New York, California and Hawaii — just as we supported action in Congress to close the domestic ivory market of our country, an action that encouraged other key countries such as China and Britain to do the same.