GAMBLING ON EXTINCTION is a powerful documentary about greed and a merciless battle over a limited resource: wild elephants and rhinos.
There is a war against nature raging in the savannahs and jungles of Africa and Asia. The illegal trade in wildlife is estimated to generate $20 billion per year. Wildlife crime is a highly organized business, luring unscrupulous investors and warlords. It’s the dark side of globalization, with the booming trade threatening not only major ecosystems but the stability of local communities and vulnerable economies. We are facing the greatest mass extinction since the era of the dinosaurs and as numbers go down, the prices go up, making it a perverse futures market in extinction. If poaching continue at the current pace, elephants and rhinos, living in the wild will be extinct in our lifetime. The slaughter is happening now, the deadly spiral towards extinction spinning faster than we can imagine.

“The world has two choices:
We can have elephants or we can have ivory trade. We can’t have both.”
Allan Thornton
Environmental Investigation Agency

Director: Jakob Kneser
Producers: Tristan Chytroschek, Anne Pick
2014 | 52 minutes