In The Land Of Vanishing Giants

At a time of unprecedented mass extinctions, no animal epitomizes the global biodiversity free fall more than the Asian elephant. Paul Kvinta travels to Laos to visit a moon-shot project aimed at saving the country’s 400 remaining wild elephants—and to investigate the strange wildlife-trafficking underworld threatening their very existence.

On the evening of april 5, 2017, an Emirates Boeing 747 freighter landed at Wattay International Airport in Vientiane, Laos, and waited on the tarmac for several hours. Its dead-of-night mission involved receiving a sizable consignment, loading it quickly, and ferrying it ten hours back to Dubai, all without attracting undue attention. Emirates had certainly sent the right plane for the job. A 747F is one of the world’s largest commercial freighters, capable of schlepping more than 300,000 pounds of cargo. The cargo in this instance consisted of 16 elephants. Whether those elephants could arrive at an airport and board a plane undetected remained anyone’s guess.

The air was hot and humid that night and full of acrid smog, because rice farmers were burning their fields before planting. Laos is a mostly rural country: mountainous, landlocked, and poor, a socialist backwater overshadowed by powerful neighbors like China and Vietnam. It’s also become a global hub for wildlife trafficking, a place where politically connected kingpins make millions smuggling ivory, rhino horn, and other dead-animal parts around the world. In 2013, when the United States slapped a $1 million bounty on the criminal network of Vixay Keosavang—a.k.a. “the Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking,” according to numerous press accounts—Laos made no move to arrest him.