In the wake of the China-Africa ivory trade : more-than-human ethics across borders

Global responses to the hotly debated China-Africa ivory trade in the past decade offer an entry point to examine whether and how African elephants have come to matter in China ethically. This article highlights the complexity of more-than-human ethics across geographic spaces and politico-cultural boundaries. We focus on the pivotal roles of conservationists who are embedded in multispecies relations on a transnational scale and who actively cultivate distant care for elephants. Reflecting upon a conservation trip named 'From Kenya to China', we demonstrate a simultaneous process through which the conservationists, on the one hand, have grown to realise different cultural contexts and regimes of values, while continuing to promote conservation ideologies and build human-nonhuman connections on the other. We argue that relational ethics in the more-than-human worlds across borders is not just about how we treat other species, but ultimately about how we treat other humans and how we educate 'others' about treating nonhumans.

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