Debbie Ethell interview with Coe Lewis

COE: And it is time for another edition of CoExist. This is a podcast and also visual on Facebook at IQ Podcasts on Facebook. This is conversation for conservation and I’m so excited because every month I introduce people to amazing world beaters, people who see something and do something and this is no exception today because my very special guest is Debbie Ethell. She is the founder of KOTA, K-O-T-A, Keepers of the Ark basically it stands for, a foundation that educates and spreads awareness of elephants, her deep love for elephants.

She is a best-selling published author of “The Will of Heaven: An Inspiring True Story About Elephants, Alcoholism, and Hope” which is stunning, to say the least. You are a conservation scientist I mean, your list of stuff that you have achieved and done is extraordinary but what is extraordinary about my special guest Debbie is that you took this circuitous route to changing the world like this crazy story that you think Oh, no that didn’t happen…Oh yeah it happened, it happened in her life and you know after reading your book, you know we’re going to be talking about everything. After reading your book I was so aware that people are meant to go through certain trials in life to get to where they are to achieve greatness. Had you not gone through what you had gone through you would not be just kicking ass and taking names in the world, you literally had to go over that, because if you’d had a smoother route in life I don’t think you’d be who you are today and what you’ve achieved. So welcome Debbie I’m so glad you’re here!

DEBBIE: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to see you again. And thanks for that great lead-in, gosh how can you compete with that?

COE: Well, you deserve every good word and so Debbie and I connected and we finally said hey let’s have dinner so we met at the Lazy Dog in Mission Valley and you know when you sit down meet somebody and you feel like I’ve known this girl my whole life, I totally understand her, I’ve met her for a few minutes and I totally understand this person. (Laughter)

DEBBIE: That’s great, right back at you.

COE: Yeah, and so we have so much to talk about. But what I’m going to do is I’m going to start off with you at the age of 26, like this very important time in your life, then we’re going to back to childhood and then we’re going to take you to where you are today. So at 26 in your book the opening is brutally honest, this whole book is so honest and we’ll get into that. But it says, “you thanked the arresting officer by saying Thank You for stopping me when I couldn’t save myself.” There were so many amazing things in this book and so many eye-opening and honest…honesty like I haven’t seen in so long. There are people who think they’re being honest and then there are people who are being brutally honest. So Debbie, um, let’s start with you at 26 because we’re going to talk about your book, your foundation, and how you got to where you can do the work with the elephants that you love.

DEBBIE: Oh, wow, so at 26 years old I was homeless, I was living in my car, I had been arrested multiple times, luckily not with a felony but all of my closest friends are multi-felons (laughter) so um, you know my prospects didn’t look good. I had tried and either dropped out or got kicked out of four colleges, I believe, and really was just completely lost and had no idea at that time I was just addicted. I was addicted to drugs, I was addicted to alcohol and I kept thinking I was just having some run of bad luck. Ah, that’s not what happened. It was um, an act of intervention, in a strange way it was being arrested for my last DUI that … it didn’t get me sober … but consequences do kind of lead to sobriety right so it wasn’t exactly that which got me sober but it was finally having everything sort of stripped away from me, my dignity, my self-esteem, all of my dreams—gone!

The elephants I’ve followed since I was eight years old I-I, you know it’s just like I didn’t know how to survive, I didn’t know how I was going to continue, so it really was this strange, incredible act of just trying to escape one last time. On my final night, I tried to take everything anybody was giving me, I was trying to just escape again just like I normally did, my family had cut me out completely, I mean they cut all ties with me, and I need to say because I always forget to say this—I deserved that. Because I showed up to their house and I stole everything they had and not the least of which their own dignity you know what I mean, so kudos to them. They went to Al-Anon, they figured out how to lay lines in the sand, they were giving me those consequences that were necessary and I finally got sober.

I went into a treatment center which led to a halfway house where I lived for a year. I had only the clothes I was wearing for nine long months so I guess I’m a little bit unique in that way in that you know I don’t look at people ever and assume, I try not to ever assume where they’ve come from because I look like this today, and I think people can look at me and think, Oh she’s never—

COE: Nobody would ever know. Nobody would ever know to look at you that you literally walked through hell. You literally walked through the flames and made it out on the other side. You know we live in a time where people are bombarded with you know, social media and fake news and all sorts of stuff, we’re so immersed and overwhelmed by things that we have literally lost ourselves in all of this because we are judging ourselves based on what others think ah, what’s the fad, what’s this? And I think whether or not you have an addiction problem or not is irrelevant, what this is is getting back to the very core and essence of who you are, stripped down to the bone where you actually see this is who Debbie really is. And you put layers back on building this amazing life with impact in the world and changing people. Your story impacts people and your story impacts animals.

I love how your book opens. It said, “What would Eleanor do? contemplating the mess I’d made of my life.” Well, it turns out Eleanor isn’t some aunt or something like that. Eleanor is an elephant you’ve followed since the age of eight. So you are this person who actually tracked the lives intimately of 400 elephants over your life because you found that you had a connection with elephants at a very early age. So we started our podcast here when you were 26 so let’s go back to the beginning and see how all these pieces tie together.

DEBBIE: So the very beginning I watched a nature show on PBS about elephants when I was eight years old. I was transfixed. But one of the elephants who caught my attention was an elephant raised by David and Daphne Sheldrick in Kenya when she was rescued from a poaching event at about two years old. They raised her up to adulthood and you know the elephants that they raise can go into the wild anytime, they choose, the elephants make the choice.

Eleanor was not the first, she was the fourth elephant they rescued I believe, but all of the elephants they went on to rescue went back into the wild around the age of around ten years old when they are sort of independent of each other or they’ve been adopted by another wild herd, but Eleanor didn’t.

Instead, she stayed behind for 33 years helping Daphne Sheldrick raise literally hundreds and hundreds of baby elephants that were coming into their care. And one after the next was going back into the wild. I was so struck and stunned, if you will, that Eleanor stayed back. I don’t think Eleanor had yet gone back into the wild when I was eight years old, in 1980. No, she definitely went back into the wild after that. So she was still with Daphne at that time.

Then I began tracking the elephants and I did it in a variety of ways you know I’m a little kid raised on a farm in Hubbard, Oregon, you know we had no money, we were really poor, we’re just farmers but my dad is a scientist so I began going to the library, which I LOVE libraries still to this day, and I would look up any magazine article, newspaper article, encyclopedia entry, anything to do with elephants or specifically those elephants there in Kenya. And I would basically copy everything down in a notebook, like a bibliography, just every place that I found any information on them. Then I would copy every detail I found about each elephant, word-for-word, and two elephants turned into two hundred and today it’s well over four hundred elephants I have every detail ever written about them copied down into massive notebooks.

One of the things that I wanted to figure out was what made Eleanor stay behind. Like what was it? She did eventually go into the wild, and she did eventually have three, that we know of, wild-born calves, but what made her stay back for thirty-three years? Their minds were so fascinating to me.

But then I was fascinated at what started happening with all of the other elephants, like those who would be rescued together. Just because you put two elephants together doesn’t mean they will get along any more than putting two humans together in a jail cell. So it was interesting how they would sort of seek out their friends and how those friendships would last their entire lifetime.

I learned how to trace each elephant’s ear by reading books by the greatest elephant researchers: Cynthia Moss, Dr. Joyce Poole, you know these incredible female scientists. They were developing the most amazing ways of tracking elephants. As more scientists converged in Kenya to study elephants so many put photographs of the elephant’s ears into their research papers and this is what I used to track them against my own traced images of elephant ears. It was one of the ways I used to track where the elephants were going and what they were doing once they went back into the wild.

What I thought was the most fascinating thing about them, as time continued, and the thing that I drew so much strength and courage from was how they were able to stay together, how tight the bonds between them were, that long after they would be released into the wild they would come back and still be together years later. Or one take care of another’s young because the other female had obviously gotten killed. They would make it through these horrific events and in a way it felt like it was a mirror of my own life. I was making it through these horrific events due to addiction and arrests and everything that goes along with that—

COE: And that’s the beauty of this book and we’re going to go back to 26 here again. But you parallel your life with the elephants in your book. There is an inner strength, a calling, and your role in life where you are supposed to be doing certain things in life.

So at 26 when you are looking at what am I going to do with the rest of my life somebody asks you what do you love, what do you love? You’re stripped bare like you said of your dignity, your dreams of everything and somebody’s trying to find that one grain of who you really are and what your heart really belongs to and tell us about that.

DEBBIE: So that was actually when I was ten years sober at the age of 36. I got sober on December 23, 1998. People ask me all the time what is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some really, really hard things, but I was even facing two years in jail at one point and that doesn’t even feel as hard. The hardest thing I’ve ever done, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is to get sober and stay that way, over 23 years now.

It took until I had about ten years sober just to figure out how to really live my life on life’s terms in this world sober. I mean first I had to figure out how to show up at a job every day and brush my teeth every day, weirdly enough it just takes some time to figure out the detail of how people live their lives.

Once I figured that out, then it was about survival. I started a very successful airbrush tanning company because I am the whitest white girl I’ve ever met.

COE: No, no, you’ve met your match. You settle down over there. I’ve got you beat. (laughter)

DEBBIE: We are the two whitest white girls, that’s right. I have always wanted to have that beautiful San Diego tan so I started an airbrush tanning company and then after a couple of years a law got changed in the state of Oregon and shut me down nearly overnight. It was incredibly successful, making money hand over fist, giant 3000-square-foot house, I mean I had it all and I lost all of it. I mean just every last bit was just gone since I was forced to shut down and the lesson in that, and I’ll say this really quickly is that I learned that it’s not losing everything that’s the hard part, that is just handing over keys, it is all you do. But it’s the thinking about losing everything that’s the worst. That’s the struggle.

It was at the height of the recession, 2007-2008 right in there, that a friend told me that if I took this one college class I could get free health care for an entire year. And now I can’t get a job, I can’t hold a job, I’m getting laid off every job I go just as the whole world was. I’m now desperate and health insurance for a year sounds too good to pass up for a free class. So I take this class and about halfway through the teacher, who is also a college counselor, sits each one of us down and says “What do you want to do?”

And I don’t care, I just want to get my bills paid. I’ll do anything, work any job, I don’t care I just want to get my bills paid. But he kept on me and didn’t like that answer. Finally, he said, “ I want you to go back to what it was when you were eight years old and I want you to write down on a piece of paper what that eight-year-old kid wanted to be.” And I was embarrassed, as I write in the book because I had literally forgotten all about the elephants, forgotten what I wanted to be when I was eight years old. Because I had gotten so distracted by making all this money, then spending all of that money, accumulating things because I had come from homelessness so I was focused on getting more things. Then I realized just how unhappy all of that stuff made me, all of the “things” did not bring me happiness, it did the exact opposite in fact of what I thought all that stuff would bring me.

COE: Because the stuff owns you. You lose yourself because your stuff owns you. And you’re right, you-you think it’s going to make you feel better, fill that hole in your life or whatever and all of sudden you’re like well, I spent a lot of money and I don’t feel better, in fact probably worse actually.

DEBBIE: Exactly, and I knew what it was like to pick myself up out of a gutter. That was the second time I had to do that although it was not anything like the gutter I came out of the first time in ’98, that was a bit different actually. (laughter).

COE: That was World War One trench warfare right there. When I read it I’m like Oh my God, that she pulled out of this is a miracle! I mean literally, you were on a path to oblivion I mean you just were on that for whatever reason, whatever was driving you there but again I have such pride and joy that you made it through to the other side because of what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been doing. So carry on about your passion and what you did with it.

DEBBIE: I ended up going back home and the counselor gave me some exercises to try and figure it out and then suddenly it was just like an epiphany and I wrote in these huge letters ELEANOR. And then I just completely started sobbing. I ran up to my attic, I had another house by then that I was renting, and I grabbed all of my elephant research boxes I had up there and began throwing them across my dining room table thinking ‘Oh my God, I hadn’t learned what happened to my beloved elephants,’ I hadn’t even opened these boxes in a few years and I suddenly felt so guilty that I had, um—

COE: You felt like you had betrayed them.

DEBBIE: Exactly! I felt like I had betrayed them. So I went back in to see my counselor on that Monday and he asked “What’d you come up with?” and I told him that I wanted to be a scientist, specifically I wanted to be an elephant scientist. But I was so scared I couldn’t tell him right away because I knew that in order to become a scientist I would have to take a lot of math and I couldn’t do math.

So he had me take a math test and that’s when I tested into fifth-grade math and you know that was a stunning revelation like I thought I was at least eighth-grade math. I knew I was bad at math but I thought I was better than an eighth-grader. I ended up having to go all the way back to one of those Mathnasium-like places with a seventh-grade math tutor who was brilliant and how taught me how to do baby math. And my God that was so humbling—

COE: (laughing) I was going to say that’s like you’re in seventh grade and I’m an adult and you’re teaching me math, okay I’ve been humbled, thank you, God, thank you for that!

DEBBIE: With a whole classroom of other seventh graders and they thought I was their teacher and I’m like Oh I lead no one in this group, I am not your leader. I didn’t even know what a fraction was so I would have been awful. I went back there, this counselor named Casey Sims, I still talk to him to this day, he was such a brilliant man, he figuratively held my hand and just showed me the next steps. Thank goodness he didn’t show me the whole big picture because it took two years, TWO YEARS before I could take a single, even introduction to science, science class. And had he shared that with me on that day I never would have stayed. I never would have waited two whole years to take a science class. But Casey shared only the lily pads, which is what I call them, just the next step, all I could see. Then he showed me how to get a tutor, I had a tutor during my entire six years in school. And finally, after six long years I made it to the top of my class having made it through the top levels of statistics, calculus and physics.

COE: Look at you starting on with fifth grade and rockin’ it!

DEBBIE: I do feel like I should get a gold medal for taking a math class every semester for six straight years! I did not take a single day off of math in six years but I wanted to go as far as I needed to in order to get my science degree. My dream ever since I was a little kid was to be a scientist but I never felt smart enough. I kept getting kicked out of colleges so that felt like a non-starter and then I had a record you know. I graduated in 2014 and in 2015 I started working these really crappy and my parents were so funny because they were like you have this degree you can go work these bigger jobs but I knew I needed to keep myself poor because I knew what I was doing. I was working toward starting this non-profit.

COE: Okay what year did you start thinking about this? I know you founded it in 2015 but when did you start thinking about it?

DEBBIE: Probably 2014 because just days after I’d graduated I was on a plane to Kenya to go find the elephants I’d searched for since I was eight years old and that was just a trip. I mean just a trip, not a “trip,” (laughing) actually it was sort of both. But while I was there it was sort of like … what do I do now? It was like I’ve been here, it resonated with my soul as it does with so many people that go there for the first time.

COE: I always see people who go to Africa and I have some people who are going over to Zambia with me this year. I always say you are going to have a soul reset when you put your foot on the ground. I can’t explain it but everything that matters or doesn’t matter just comes into vision, like crystal clear, it’s a soul reset, it changes your perspective on life and in the world.

DEBBIE: Yes, that’s exactly true. And having just come through losing everything, then being in school for six straight years it was … money was not going to be the thing I was going to chase I was no longer interested in that. It needed to be changing the world in some way. By then I had 15, 16 years sober I had realized it was the elephants who had saved my life in so many ways. And now I felt like I had betrayed them by not getting my degree sooner but now it was even more necessary to do whatever I could to help so I thought then I would try it as a non-profit. I learned how to set up a non-profit and started doing that right when I got back in the summer of 2014.

I started working these odd jobs so that I could stay poor and stay on task and stay on my mission so that I could preserve my best brain cells for doing that instead of working for someone else. But to back up in my junior year in college I’d read this book called Keepers of the Ark and this book floored me in such a huge way so I wanted to name my foundation Keepers of the Ark but I couldn’t find the author because he wrote it under his initials but I wanted to name my foundation that since it seemed like the perfect title. It’s what we are. We are Keepers of the Ark, we have the ability to let elephants go extinct and we have the power the save them. At the end of the day, that decision is entirely up to us. I truly believe that decision is up to us as humans, not just Americans, but humans. So instead I decided to use the first letter of each word and name my foundation KOTA.

It’s The KOTA Foundation for Elephants and we made our focus on education in the United States. And the reason why I did that was because I was out talking to people all the time, I was telling them about these incredible stories about the elephants the Sheldricks’ rescued and nobody knew anything about them. No one knew what elephants were capable of.

We needed to start all the way back at the beginning and work our way forward. I started going into schools but realized I needed to think bigger, we also needed to have projects on the ground in Kenya. Our first project was that I raised enough money to buy enough desks for all the students at six separate schools, nine hundred kids get a seat at a desk.

COE: Which is awesome!

DEBBIE: Yes, and this is in a very, very rural part of Kenya. What a lot of people didn’t realize and I think a lot of people still don’t realize is that kids and most adults in these countries that have elephants; Kenya, Tanzania have never seen an elephant before.

COE: That’s true.

DEBBIE: Much more Americans have seen living elephants than the people that are there so…

COE: It’s funny you say that because um, something I wanted to bring up because I feel like I’m talking to myself listening to you. Our foundations were started in the same year. We had this higher calling this pull to do something on a higher scale. One of the projects we decided to do in Zambia was taking children into national parks to actually see the wildlife that lives right around them. It’s like living in San Diego and never having been to the beach. It’s amazing, I mean, there are some areas where we have human/elephant conflict areas but for the most part, a lot of them have never seen them.

DEBBIE: Sure and we expect people to solve this problem since it’s in their backyard. But how can you expect someone to fix the ocean if they’ve never seen the ocean? Why would you care? You don’t see it, it’s not there, it’s not your main concern. And yet elephants are absolutely vital to humans surviving at the same time. There’s this absolute disconnect about that too like Oh yeah, elephants are cute and they’re nice to look at but you know who really cares if they all get exterminated off the planet? Well, they are a keystone species so it changes the entire ecological system everywhere they are.

We have lots of countries like where you’re from, Ethiopia, that used to have lots of elephants that have no elephants now and Somalia is another one of these regions that have become these barren wastelands not just because of climate change but because you remove something like elephants that have the ability to grow fertile grasslands, more vegetation that creates more water, that creates more weather systems, kind of like a beaver or a wolf does here.

COE: They are critical to the health of the environment. You remove them everything goes to you-know-what.

DEBBIE: Exactly. Then you have the ivory end of it which is just a huge human problem as you well know. Then we started doing “The Elephant in the Room,” which is our YouTube series of eleven episodes, three-to-five minutes each, covering topics that I find fascinating about elephants. We not only cover anatomy, like an elephant’s trunk or an elephant’s foot but also concepts like the fact that Kenyan children don’t see elephants. We also passed a law in the State of Oregon to ban the sale of ivory in the state of Oregon, we became the sixth state to do so. The bad news is that that law actually does absolutely nothing.

COE: How do you…how do you approach that because I wrote that in my notes. I’ve heard this from other states, they pass the law and they’re all gung-ho but there’s no teeth to the laws so what do you do now to make that more impactful?

DEBBIE: There are a few ways, the viewers will have to forgive me if I don’t know all of them, but it’s much, much harder to go out and get a brand new law passed and put on the books than it is to change existing law. For Oregon, and I can only speak to our law, but I can compare it to California’s or Washington’s. California has got a locked-in law and so does Washington so we’re squished right in the middle with really nothing and we’re seeing a lot of ivory from Washington and California coming over the borders, which are both open by the way, making its way to be sold here in Oregon.

In Oregon, the ivory law is a civil law, meaning it only attaches civil penalties, and the only way that I, so-so, if you talk to say the Humane Society of the United States, and they’re the big pushers of the law and I get frustrated with that because I adore them as a group but they’ll say Oh no, the law has teeth, the law has teeth. Okay, this is how I determine whether this (or any) law has teeth, is if I find illegal ivory, and right now I can point to ten or more antique stores within a five-mile radius of where I’m sitting and they all have illegal ivory. Now I don’t think they mean to have illegal ivory, I think the laws are incredibly confusing, they change all the time, so this is a wildlife trafficker’s dream but needless to say they all have illegal ivory in these antique stores. So who do I call? What I want to know is that when I find illegal ivory Who Do I Call to report this illegal ivory?

COE: Well, I’m going to step in and I’m going to give you help with this because we had a situation here a few years ago where a gallery called La Joya Gallery was selling illegal ivory and we picketed and we shut them down. They closed the shop and he got a huge fine. They found more stuff like in a warehouse and all that stuff. So what you do is you go to these stores and talk to them and say Hey, you’ve got illegal ivory and you can get rid of it properly and give it to the government authorities or we’re going to take a stand here. Because once people see Oh my God I don’t want to touch that stuff because people will come down on me like a box of rocks so you might want to think about that.

DEBBIE: No, totally and these are great tricks that you can do, it takes a lot of time to do that, but we can also get the law changed. Basically, what I was getting at is there isn’t anybody that we can actually call when we find illegal ivory being sold in the state of Oregon. The US Fish and Wildlife, deal with interstate commerce meaning illegal ivory crossing state lines. So if you get caught taking an illegal ivory tusk from Oregon to Washington, which is just an open highway, there’s no checkpoint of any kind, just a sign that says “Hey Welcome to Washington,” and if they catch you on that border than yeah, the US Fish and Wildlife will get involved.

The US Fish and Wildlife did get involved in a case we brought to them recently that involved an estate sale selling two raw, uncarved tusks they were selling that stood taller than I stand. And they literally had it for sale on their website. I was suffering that day from a humungous fever and I was so sick and could not believe what I was hearing from one of my volunteers who stumbled across it. We sent a bunch of people down there to take a look and sure enough, it was right there out in the open. They didn’t even think what they were doing was illegal or that anyone might be checking.

I contacted the head of the US Fish and Wildlife in Oregon and it just so happened that they had a guy in a court case that day that suddenly fell apart so he had a free afternoon. He went down there and they made the bust. But the problem is that there is so much money involved in illegal trafficking it is the third—

COE: Five Billion Dollars

DEBBIE: It is worth billions and billions of dollars in the US behind only drugs and trafficking. And—

COE: I want to stop you there for a second because I want to make it connect with our viewers and listeners to make the connection about what those big tusks mean to our listeners. The last time I was in Zambia I met a guy who worked for a large NGO, non-governmental organization, and in this one period in the 1980s, 17,000 elephants were wiped out of the South Luangwa area in Zambia, 17,000! So much so that the genetics changed so dramatically that they are about 2-3 feet shorter than one park over. Everyone wants the biggest tusks but when you take the big tuskers out, most of them are gone now anyway, but when you remove those the genetics change. You get weaker animals. It happens when you kill a lion, you end up killing ten more because another dominant male moves in and then proceeds to kill the previous male’s cubs.

So pull back that curtain a bit and look at all the bloodshed behind it and the wreckage somebody wreaked having those tusks. I mean this is, you have to think a few steps past what you see and what you hear.

DEBBIE: I agree. I agree. So when you take a state like Oregon where we have eight, maybe ten, I may be getting the exact number wrong, but I know it’s ten or less US Fish and Wildlife officials that cover the entire state of Oregon who deal with poaching and that includes mountain lions, elk, deer, and anyone who poaches those animals which there are so many, where do you think the officers are at during hunting season? They’re in the forests dealing with everything else so there simply aren’t enough officers to deal with illegal ivory, not when poaching is so rampant everywhere else. There just isn’t enough money to deal with all of it though if we had more officers we certainly could try.

COE: Now that you’re saying that, again I feel like our lives are so parallel in so many ways, but isn’t there a way a watchdog organization can be created in these types of situations in these states to fill the gap? In San Francisco, there are only three officers at the docks to look for illegal contraband. Three. Looking through all of San Francisco’s ports. Thanks a lot. That will get you nothing. Is there a way for a watchdog group to help?

DEBBIE: Yes. Absolutely. Creating something like that takes a lot of structure and a lot of planning and there are already the beginnings of that happening. So much of the illegal ivory trade has moved online but I’m seeing small changes on Visa, Mastercard, Facebook, eBay… I do a Google search once a week and I find so much of it for sale illegally that I just can’t even…I mean whatever is happening is not working clearly but a little is better than nothing I suppose. At least none of it is a deterrent to anyone who wants to sell or there is simply too much to monitor. Also, the rules are different for every kind of ivory, like any kind of marine mammal ivory falls under the Marine Mammal Protection Act which includes walrus ivory, whale teeth—

COE: Hippo teeth.

DEBBIE: Well then you have hippo teeth which is actually separate from the marine mammals or warthog ivory which is pretty much legal everywhere or mammoth ivory which is also legal everywhere. Now we’re seeing mammoth ivory, when it’s broken down and tested, is actually brand new elephant ivory, it’s not at all mammoth but made to look like mammoth. So you know, if you’re an illegal ivory trafficker then the easiest way to do that is to disguise it as the legal stuff and no one knows the difference.

It's another project that I’d really like to raise money for and that is to do an entire Ivory web series and just go through all of the different legislation just to show how confusing it is. Again if you’re a trafficker this is your paradise. Make it as confusing as possible so no one knows the difference. I don’t think most antique store owners mean to sell something illegal I just think it’s gotten so convoluted it’s just too hard to tell anymore. We do know now that the owners of the estate sale were indeed part of the illegal wildlife trafficking trade and luckily they have now been shut down. They got busted a few years ago for selling illegal tiger paws so this was the last straw.

We need to get our current law in Oregon changed from a civil penalty law to criminal law, as it is in both Washington and California so that you can actually attach penalties which are expensive because if you’re going to make a law a criminal law you have to write in where are you going to come up with the money to prosecute. Unfortunately, most of the eight states or so that have passed anti-ivory laws have only passed the civil penalty laws so most people think passing the law in itself was enough and they end up walking away not realizing they just passed a law that effectively does nothing at all to stop the illegal trade of ivory.

My question is that if you find a piece of illegal ivory Who Do You Call? And if there isn’t someone then that ivory law, I don’t care who defends it, if there isn’t something that I can do to get the ivory removed then that’s just a crap law and that needs to be changed. And I’m a little bit exhausted with working so hard on things that mean absolutely nothing right? We’re all short on time and—

COE: Yeah and let me walk it through since my foundation is over in Africa where it all starts. You have countries that are in abject poverty who make maybe a couple of hundred dollars a year. And you have these individuals or China who are basically colonizing Africa right now and they say Hey do you want twenty bucks to kill an elephant? Here’s twenty dollars, we need an elephant. Twenty dollars may as well be twenty thousand dollars to some of these people who are literally just trying to survive. We’re not going after the real poachers but the poorest individuals simply trying to feed their families.

That ivory then is taken out, and they’ve gotten as sophisticated in Africa as they have with rhino horn. They hack their faces off while they’re still alive traumatizing all of the animals around, the mothers, the young siblings, and that ivory is then taken out of that country within six hours. When I was a kid in Ethiopia there were ten million elephants on the planet and today there are fewer than 300,000. We are losing 100 per day, extinction is happening. We need to get our you-know-what together over here in the US in order to really help Africa. If there was no market here there would be no incentive. We just can’t have these laws on paper that sound good but do absolutely nothing.

DEBBIE: I’m glad you brought the poacher and that it is actually an entire group of people working together for a kingpin, it is never just one guy. We did an entire episode about this for my YouTube series because of all the negative chatter I see on social media about killing the poacher like that solves the problem. The problem is actually quite simple. The guys at the top are sophisticated and interested in only one thing: money. And money brings them more power. If they invest in something and the bottom falls out they move on to the next thing. Essentially, if we remove the market for ivory, and I mean all ivory, mammoth, marine mammal, any and all ivory so it makes no difference whether they sneak illegal in with legal, if we remove the market then they have no place to sell it. And we’ve seen this very thing work with ivory in the past. Remove the market, the kingpins move on.

Remember that leaving an elephant alive brings in about two million dollars of revenue over its entire life. Killing an elephant with massive tusks, even if you could find one, only brings in a fraction of that amount at $200,000 at the MOST. And its dead so it has no ability to continue making revenue. Its in everyone’s best interest to leave elephants alive and if we truly want to stop the killing, then stop the trade.

COE: And get the money into the hands of the local people like in NSEFU we started a sewing program so that we can sell items they make getting money into the hands of the people who need it most. This has been the most fascinating hour and I could talk to you for days!

DEBBIE: I know right? (laughing)

COE: I feel so blessed and so lucky that I got to meet you. Your story is so inspiring. Again you have a best-selling book called “The Will of Heaven: An Inspiring True Story About Elephants, Alcoholism, and Hope” and it’s been so successful that you’ve got two more book deals because this is going to be a series. If you want to find out more about Debbie you can visit her website which is simply her first and last name: debbieethell.com. I can’t wait to share this and get the podcast out all over the world. You are so inspiring, seriously Debbie, I think everybody really needs to read this book and congratulations!

DEBBIE: Thank you. It was truly my pleasure.