Reports have emerged today of the worst recorded case of poaching in Kenya’s history as an entire family of twelve African elephants were gunned down by professional poachers using automatic rifles. As a criminal defence lawyer, I’m accustomed to seeing acts of ruthless violence perpetrated against the innocent and the helpless. And I am keenly aware that, as much as we may love and cherish them, animlas are not people. You won’t see me at the vanguard of any PETA protests. I eat meat (in fact, I LOVE to eat meat). I wear leather shoes. I even have a leather jacket.

Having said all that, it boggles my mind that in 2013 poaching remains an existential threat to many species of endangered wild animals. I am not naive. I know what the poachers get out of it. Money. Boatloads of money. The kind of money that most people living in Africa cannot even dream about because it is so incomprehensibly vast.

What leaves me scratching my head is how the educated modern buyer fails to make the connection between their credit card and an elephant carcass. There is not a person alive today who can reasonably claim to be unaware that buying ivory — sold primarily in the Asian markets of Vietnam and China — kills endangered species. I have a passing comprehension of the unfortunate individual stricken by cancer duped into the false belief that crushing rhino horn in their tea will cure their fatal malady. I don’t condone it. I don’t even completely understand it. But I can at least comprehend how illness can sufficiently cloud the mind such that a person might foolishly think ‘it’s me or the rhino’.

So, what goes through the head of a callous shopper looking to pick up a pair of ivory chopsticks or a Buddhist nick-knack? Here’s a primer for their next shopping trip.

THIS is what a family of majestic elephants looks like (taken by me on safari this summer in Tanzania):

NOT like this: