In the west and the forested centre, elephants are in a particularly perilous condition. For thousands of years ivory has been prized and elephants have been killed for it. The Egyptian pharoah Tutankhamun was laid to rest around BC on a headrest of ivory, while in nearby Syria elephants were more or less wiped out for their ivory by BC.
The invention of guns increased the pressure. The 19th century brought a fashion for big game hunting among colonialists, which wiped out herds across the continent of Africa. Now the remaining dwindling numbers face the threat of local hunters and modern poaching gangs, financed by Asian syndicates and armed by the conflicts of Africa. Some experts see the brutal killings of elephants not as a battle for a commodity, but for land. As the human population booms, so does demand for space.
Poaching conveniently removes elephants from the land, leaving it open to development. This is a pattern seen across western Africa, where elephant declines have been most precipitous.
The tightly-contested rural landscapes of Asia have seen a more direct form of conflict between humans and elephants. Human lives are also in danger. In India, panicked or enraged elephants kill more than people each year pdf. This leads to retaliation. Wildlife authorities often hunt down and kill problem elephants. In Indonesia, dozens of elephants are poisoned by palm oil growers each year.
He estimated that African elephant numbers fell from one million to , during the s. Without the often dangerous work of Hamilton, governments would not have come together to ban the international trade in ivory in This led to a recovery in elephant numbers until , when infiltration of the ivory trade by criminal gangs, rising Asian demand and high levels of corruption increased the levels of poaching with catastrophic results.
Around 20, African elephants were killed last year for their tusks, more than were born. Buy a gift of chili, dung and engine oil to help people and elephants in Africa!
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Amy Fraenkel, executive secretary of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, said: "I hope that it will lead to greater conservation actions for both species. Ms Duporge said conservationists doing work "on the ground in Africa" to protect habitats would be the most crucial players in the effort to protect the animals.
Follow Victoria on Twitter. Elephants counted from space for conservation. Image source, Frank AF Petersens.
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