- August 12 is World Elephant Day
- World Elephant Day was founded in 2012 by Patricia Sims and the Elephant Reintroduction Foundation.
<!–Stillness lingers in Rungwa at the heart of Tanzania. Near the narrow road that runs through the bush is a boneyard with a shattered skeleton as its centerpiece. In life, it must have belonged to a giant mammal. An elephant? It is hard to tell at a glance. The front of the skull is missing. There is a thorny hole where there once was a trunk and two tusks.
Elephants are gone from the area, either fleeing the violence, or dead, poached for their parts. Both are aftereffects of the trade in tusks.
Tanzania has been hit hard, having lost 60,000 elephants – about 60 percent of its population – since 2009 according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). They are being slaughtered for their ivory. In particular, the Ruaha-Rungwa ecosystem’s elephant numbers have plummeted. Interpol, an organization that coordinates investigations into international crimes, indicates that much of the ivory in global markets originated from elephants in Tanzania.
“Areas in and around Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park, including Rungwa, are killing fields with the most well-organized poaching across Africa,” says Aaron Nicholas, WCS Program Director of the Ruaha-Katavi Landscape.
Elephants are near the top of the illegal trade list for products made from wild animals. The multinational appetite to own artwork carved from elephant tusks has dealt a crushing blow to these plant-eating pachyderms that roam the forests and savannas of Africa. Elephant numbers have dropped by more than half in the past 30 years. Current estimates by the Great Elephant Census®, a Paul G. Allen Project, show that approximately 400,000 elephants remain.
African elephants are a keystone species that hold together entire environments in their range. Listed as “Vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, they are at high risk of becoming endangered. With poachers killing as many as 35,000 elephants each year, the world’s largest land mammal could soon be gone.
If the primary reason for slaughtering elephants is to satisfy a human desire to possess their tusks, then finding a solution to stop it should be simple. It is anything but.
Passing laws that ban ivory sales help to protect one of the world’s most iconic species from extinction just as continuing international communication will bridge the chasms. But, the single most effective solution to halting the trade in tusks is for consumers to act responsibly and not covet or own any piece of a dead elephant.–>
Every year on August 12, the world celebrates elephants, but recent years have not been great for these iconic animals.
According to research published last year, the African elephant population dropped by more than 100,000 in just ten years to just over 400,000 today. Poaching for ivory is the top threat to elephants.
However there have been important developments of late. Most notably, China — the largest market for ivory — has banned the elephant ivory trade.
See our elephant news feed to keep track of the latest developments.
This slideshow below comes via Mongabay’s partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Wild View blog. All photos by Julie Larsen Maher.
Cite this article
Mongabay (2017). On World Elephant Day, troubling times for African elephants. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-198299Credits
