In an article published this week, reporters for the New York Times presented a tragic account of how various groups of people, some that are renegade, some that are supposedly legitimate arms of a government are, in efforts to increase their revenue, systematically poaching elephants in many parts of central Africa.  Hundreds of elephants are being slaughtered, their mottled carcasses, rapidly drying in the sun, strewn across the savannah and jungle that mark the region.
     The most horrific part of this story is that in most instances the poachers are not killing the elephants for food; they are killing them solely for their tusks.  Because ivory tusks--but not elephant hide--fetch a high price in markets around the globe, members of these groups have a high incentive, after they kill the elephant, to take only the tusks.  Why lug the carcass out of the jungle?
     Whether or not we believe that an elephant, like any other animal, is a wondrous creation of God and therefore fully deserving, apart from any legitimate human need for it, of life and existence, we should certainly deplore this senseless slaughter.  Every animal we without good cause kill, depletes our experience of the totality of the created order.  We remove a vital link (think about chaos theory's butterfly effect) from the remarkable chain of interconnections that pervades and sustains the creation in which we live and breathe.  When we kill animals for no good reason, we undermine the vitality and integrity of the planet's harmony, a harmony from which we humans benefit as much as our fellow animals, a harmony which, rightly appraised, reflects, in so many astonishing ways, the existence of the purposeful love and guiding intelligence in which the earth had its origins.  We miss the full picture of what God would like us to see.
     Put another way, we miss the seminal truth that undergrids, inhabits, and perpetuates our lives.