Hong Kong customs displays its latest haul of smuggled ivory. Officials found almost 800 elephant tusks, chopped up and hidden in crates beneath slabs and stones, destination unclear. Poachers shot the elephants and then hacked out their tusks with machetes. Elephants need the tusks to breath, fight and feed.

These ivory tusks, after they are crafted, they are high-valued goods.The smugglers, they will send these high valued goods to the places that they can make a profit.

Hong Kong customs believes that the 1.4 million-dollar shipment comes from Kenya and will smuggle to Malaysia. Besides Hong Kong, major illicit ivory seizures have been made in mainland China, the Philippines and Vietnam and Thailand. As people become wealthier in Asia, they are driving up the demand for ivory products, with china shipping was as one of biggest markets.

There is no intelligence, and no information, suggesting that there is an increasing trend of smuggling cases of smuggling ivory tusks detected.

But Friday’s one ton shipment is the Hong Kong’s third major seizure of illegal ivory in three months. Customs seize nearly four tons of ivory worth 3.5 million last October. That toll was smuggled from Kenya and Tanzania, two of the many countries where elephants live in Africa see here in red. Elephant populations in many of those areas is at risk of shrinking. Biologists say at this rate of proaching, and the illicit ivory trade could wipe out Africa’s elephants in less than 20 years.