BERNARDSTON — It only takes a matter of seconds for a 6-ton elephant to fall to its death once a poacher pulls the trigger and fires off a massive bullet to puncture the animal’s thick skin.
This sight — as alarming as it might sound — is a daily activity in Africa and Asia as poachers track elephants, slaughtering them to harvest their tusks to make a variety of ivory items, including kitchen utensils, jewelry and sculptures for a large monetary award. Rhino poaching is also a common activity in those continents, with the belief that the tusk material can heal ailments such as fevers and cancer.
Bernardston resident and filmmaker Rawn Fulton volunteered in India for the Peace Corps with his wife in the 1990s. They were immersed in a culture heavily influenced by the act of elephant and rhino poaching due to a high demand from Chinese and Vietnamese markets, and shocked by the extreme desire for animal horns.
“The problem of encroachment of natural areas where wildlife has lived for millennia has reached a crisis level,” Rawn Fulton said. “These are just cultural traditions that are very, very hard to change and so the result is that the market value of ivory has skyrocketed and the more precious or scarce it gets, the more the price goes up. It’s a downward spiral that is driving these animals to virtual extinction based on all these pressures.”
Rawn Fulton’s brother, Travis Fulton — a resident of Aspen, Colo. — also traveled across the globe witnessing a variety of cultures, and the experiences of both men sparked an inspiration about four years ago to create a film showcasing the environmental effects of elephant poaching. The men collaborated with Vladimir Van Maule of Filmontage Productions based out of Naperville, Ill., and created two versions of the film that were each aimed at a different audience.
The first version of the video, “The Elephant in the Room,” was created for an Asian audience and shows the step-by-step process of manufacturing a tusk into a sculpture. The two-minute long film outlines the process in reverse order with the initial frame showing an intricate ivory carving on a Chinese couple’s mantel and concludes with the elephant grazing in it’s natural habitat.
“We see the poacher with his rifle and the poacher magically pulls the trigger and makes the bullet come in reverse out of the elephant and back into the gun and then the elephant rises and walks away,” Rawn Fulton described as the final scene of the retrograded video. “That film won a number of awards and was shown for a number of months on the jumbotron screen in Beijing International Airport. Even the Chinese government agrees that this is an important thing to pay attention to.”
The one-minute second version of the video, “Let Them Live,” was created for millennials and shows a clip of urban school students drawing an elephant on a playground with a rap song about the detrimental effects of poaching playing in the background. View the video here: bit.ly/24BSc94.
The men submitted the shorter video into the International Elephant Film Festival — hosted by the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival — which was chosen as a finalist in the micro-movie category. The filmmaking team accepted an invitation to attend the annual World Wildlife Day conference at the United Nations headquarters for a ceremony to announce the festival winners. In 2013, the United Nations General Assembly declared March 3 as World Wildlife Day to celebrate and raise awareness about all species living on mother earth.
“There’s people coming from all over the world to the UN for a major high level meeting, — which we will be participating in — to discuss how we can help reduce and eventually eliminate poaching before there’s nothing left to poach,” Rawn Fulton said. “This is the kind of thinking we are trying to encourage.”
Even if the men don’t win an award at this week’s New York City conference, Rawn Fulton said their dedication has paid off in numerous ways because the video has already reached thousands of people and will continue its publicity journey through today as it’s played 20 times a day in Times Square on the Xinhua News Agency’s jumbotron screen.
“The key of this is not to have everyone stand still and watch it,” Rawn Fulton said. “The key is that we can then say, ‘This was shown in Times Square on the jumbotron with Chinese government approval.’”
Rawn Fulton said humanity is a global threat to wildlife and believes the only way to impact and possibility change a person’s behavior is to advertise the video on various social media platforms and plans to start that project in the near future.
“When you’re in junior high and you have your tablet or your phone and you want to login to YouTube, I want to have a 15-second version of this come up before you watch your video. That’s really where it’s going to work,” he added. “Instead of watching Farmers Insurance with a piano falling on your car — which is funny — let’s do this too. I know we need it.”