Memory of an Elephant UPDATE

The latest news about this suggests that Bob Parsons killed a young female elephant, not a "bull in musth" as he previously claimed.We are in the final phases of moving our GoDaddy accounts to our new hosting provider and domain registrar, which are imountain.com and namecheap.com, respectively.

---------------- From Discovery.com ------------------
In a widely circulated video last week, billionaire GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons brags about shooting a bull "problem elephant" in Zimbabwe, but one of the world's leading elephant experts has told Discovery News that the animal was likely a young female.

During the video, Parsons is shown shooting the elephant and then smiling while casually leaning against its dead body, gun resting on the animal's head.

"The 'bull' that GoDaddy CEO, Mr. Bob Parsons, brags about appears to be a young female," said Joyce Poole, an elephant researcher and conservationist who has studied the animals for over 30 years. Poole first worked at Amboseli National Park under the mentorship of elephant expert Cynthia Moss and is now director of research and conservation at ElephantVoices.

"The video is low resolution, but the elephant's very slender tusks and the lack of male genitalia, which would have been visible, leave me with little doubt," Poole said. "Was Mr. Parsons so ignorant that he was not able to sex the elephant he killed, or was his claim that the elephant was a bull just one more example of his macho arrogance and misjudgment?"

"The fact that he put out his video for the whole world to see shows both," she added.

The video suggests this is Parsons' second year of killing elephants in Africa. He portrays himself as a hero, ridding villagers of "aggressive" bull elephants that raid their sorghum crops.

Elephant specialists, however, believe that such hunters are actually putting villagers and others who encounter the pachyderms in more danger.

Read the rest of this article at http://news.discovery.com/animals/parsons-elephant-killing-110404.html

@godaddy CEO kills elephant, drives away customers, including us! Read our take on it here: http://ping.fm/s9dT6 @namecheap fail

The memory of an elephant

In keeping with our beliefs regarding the sacredness of the Earth and her creatures, our Board of Directors today authorized the transfer of all of our domain and hosting accounts away from GoDaddy.com. The CEO of GoDaddy, Bob Parsons, recently posted a video showing him killing a wild elephant at a village in Zimbabwe.

While we are not going to attempt to debate the validity of hunting vs. non-hunting vs. sport hunting, we do note several things.

1. Elephants are still endangered in many parts of the world, including Zimbabwe, who until the regime of the current dictator Mugabe, had an active and successful conservation program which protected elephants and  brought thousands of tourists (and brought economic support for the villages via their money)  to view the herds in their natural habitat.

2. There exist many other ways to deter elephants from populated areas. According to a Zimbabwean wildlife expert, shootings like this do little to deter negative interaction between human settlements and the elephant population.

3. Elephants are intelligent, sensitive, intensely social and will grieve for their lost family members. Causing harm to such a creature in the name of sport is not something that we can continue to support financially.

As we are currently in the process of transferring our sites and domains, if you see  any weirdness with how our sites operate, or if it looks like they are down, please be patient with the transfer process, and check back in a day or so. This blog will not be affected by the changes, so go ahead and bookmark it to stay updated on the transfer status.

All of our domain registrations are being moved to Namecheap.com, who is currently offering a great deal to GoDaddy customers to transfer their domains. Additionally, they will donate $1 from every domain transfer fee to savetheelephants.org.

If you would like to transfer any of your sites / domains and need help with this process, GOOD.is has a great step-by-step tutorial on how to leave Godaddy.com.

Additionally, we voted to move our hosting accounts to www.iMountain.com which powers all of their servers with solar electricity, generated onsite at their location. So this decision was an easy one to make, and one that is in line with our stated intentions to support the sacredness inherent in all things.

Huge thanks go out to all of our attendees, readers, vendors & volunteers who made the Spring Fling Psychic Faire a success! http://ping.fm/ndAyi