Creative conservationist   Asher Jay is a designer, artist, writer, and activist who is trying to save the world's most threatened wildlife with an unusual weapon: Art.  "Today we need everyone's involvement, not just core conservationists," says Jay. " People with no previous interest in conservation tune in to my messages because they engage with my work aesthetically. It starts as an interest in art for art's sake and ends with making lifestyle changes." The New York-based artist has become a visual voice for a range of environmental causes. In Africa, screen savers glow with Jay's graphics of a Poached rhino horn dripping with blood. Jay's cartoons of elephants killed for their tusks have been shown in New York's Times Square, wild other works have spread worldwide on social media.  "The right image can overcome language and cultural barriers, connecting with people on a non-verbal, emotional level," she says. "It all starts with making an emotional impression on one person. Only then will someone change habits, speak out, or donate." In recent years, much of Jay's best known work has focused on the illegal ivory trade.  In 2012, she created a silk screen print, showing a stark image of an elephant's head silhouetted in black, dripping with red blood, and accented by a tusk decorated with images of elephants' families. "Every tusk costs a life," said accompanying text. "Stop poaching." "I wanted to visualize the scale and brutality of the crisis and use art to tell the blood ivory story," she says. "Every year, 35,000 elephants are slaughtered; that's one every 15 minutes." "Two-thirds of Africa's elephants have been killed for tusks in the last 35 years. If this continues, experts predict elephants in the wild will be extinct in less than ten years." Much of Jay's work around poaching aims simply to correct a widespread misunderstanding. "Many people think an elephant's tusk or a rhino's horn simply falls off, like losing a tooth. My goal," she says, "is to make them understand that elephants die painful deaths, because they are alive and conscious as poachers cut out their tusks." What does Jay say about the effect of art?
It is a visual voice for animal protection. It needs words to illustrate its meaning. It can help more money to be donated to people in need. It makes an emotional impression on people.