Over 11,000 elephants killed by poachers in a single park [warning: graphic photo]

Over 11,000 elephants killed by poachers in a single park [warning: graphic photo]



Surveys in Gabon’s Minkebe National Park have revealed rare and hard data on the scale of the illegal ivory trade over the last eight years: 11,100 forest elephants have been slaughtered for their tusks in this remote protected area since 2004. In all, poachers have cut down the park’s elephant population by two-thirds, decimating what was once believed to be the largest forest elephant population in the world.

“Without a global commitment, great elephant populations will soon become a thing of the past,” the president of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Cristián Samper, said. WCS helped conduct the surveys along with WWF and Gabon’s National Parks Agency, the ANPN. “We believe that elephants can still be saved—but only if nations greatly increase their efforts to stop poaching while eliminating the illegal ivory trade through better enforcement and reduced demand.”

While Africa’s savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) have often been the focus of media reports on poaching, it’s the continent’s forest elephants that have been hit hardest. Recent studies have argued that forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis)—which are smaller and sport straighter tusks than the more widely known savannah elephants—are in fact a distinct elephant species, and not just a subspecies. Forest elephants are found largely in the Congo, where political instability, poverty, corruption, and a lack of law enforcement have made poaching even easier.

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Forest elephant in Gabon. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.

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A butchered forest elephant head in Minkebe National Park. Photo by: Mike Fay.

Read full article by Jeremy Hance on Mongabay.com

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