I was a Dog in Isiolo – PROMO The latest about the greatest wildlife threat of our time.
Urgent and unusual, this short film tracks the trail of illegal elephant ivory and rhino horn and searches for solutions from Richard Brock.
Sadly, one truth about important and negative news stories is that, as the media continues to report them, they have a decreasing impact, verging on rejection. So called “fatigue”. A classic example is climate change. It is, also, I believe, true of the elephant ivory and rhino horn tragedies and the public are so used to hearing or seeing about that they are increasingly dismissed… “Oh, I know about that. Isn’t it terrible” And on the next, new, story.
So I made “I was a dog in Isiolo” in an effort to overcome that elephant and rhino fatigue. However many statistics you ventilate, however many mauled elephant or rhinos you show (and many people don’t want to see those anyway), the information is diluted in the flood of today’s media. “Dog” tries to overcome this. By tracking “The Chinese Connection” where dogs are eaten in Isiolo in northern Kenya, we follow Chinese road builders north where they move from dogs to elephants, not to eat but to steal their tusks — Ivory. Illegal poaching is bringing Kenya’s elephants to their knees. Not only the elephants will suffer but also Kenya’s vital tourism trade, as the wildlife is stolen by Chinese greed. All over Africa “The Chinese Connection” is from Angola to Zimbabwe raping the resources in the name of ‘progress’.