Poaching Could Drive Elephants Extinct in Decades

Changila, a male elephant, before being poached outside Samburu National Reserve Kenya. Image courtesy of David Daballen.

Two or more dead elephants in one place means one thing: poaching by professional killers. Another tip-off is the lack of a face, as poachers hack off the tusks to be sold for ivory. That ivory is then made into valuable trinkets in Asia or even parts of violin bows in Europe and North America. The proceeds often and other criminal enterprises. And such poaching is causing populations of African elephants to decline by at least 2 percent per year since 2010, according to a . If this rate continues, in a few decades.

Poaching has been on the rise since 2008; and in 2011 as many as 40,000 elephants died for their tusks. The new field census of carcasses provides the first assessment of just how bad such poaching has become in recent years. In Kenya, at least, the rate of elephant kills matched up almost perfectly with , suggesting that as ivory gets more expensive, more elephants will be killed for their ivory.

Two adult elephants killed in close proximity in northern Kenya. Clustered kills are a sign of professional poaching. Image courtesy of Chris Leadisimo.

Central Africa’s . The known population is down more than 60 percent since 2002. And, in recent years, populations of their savannah elephant cousins have begun to decline as well. Poachers are killing off an that , can and stands as the largest remaining land animal on the planet.

Since 2011, at least in Kenya, the killing seems to have slowed, perhaps because that’s the year began restricting ivory auctions. One solution might be to , at least in the short term. In the long term, the only answer is to slow the demand for ivory in favor of a demand for living elephants. Otherwise, this generation could be the last to see proboscideans walk the wild.