Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Leakey

There is no poetry here, and that is the point. Leakey’s blunt sentence structure reads like a field report filed under moral emergency: elephants “slaughtered in masses,” then the extra twist of the knife, “even” near “big tourist hotels.” That adverb is doing heavy work. It signals not just scale but audacity, a crime committed in plain sight. The subtext: if this can happen beside the polished storefront of safari fantasy, then the usual alibis - remoteness, ignorance, “it’s complicated” - are dead on arrival.

Leakey, an environmentalist who spent years battling poaching in Kenya, is also talking about governance and global appetite. The hotels function as a symbol of the international gaze: Western travelers arrive expecting curated wilderness, while the actual economy around them is braided with corruption, underpaid enforcement, and the black-market logic of ivory. By placing bloodshed next to tourism infrastructure, he implicates a system that sells nature as an experience while failing to protect it as a living commons.

The line’s intent is strategic outrage. It reframes poaching from a distant tragedy into a public scandal, one that should embarrass officials, unsettle tourists, and pressure policymakers. Leakey isn’t asking for sympathy; he’s making the violence legible, immediate, and politically actionable. The shock isn’t only that elephants are dying. It’s that everyone is nearby, and the killing continues anyway.