Today is World Elephant Day, and conservationists have petitioned Tanzania to stop issuing permits for the trophy hunting of the gentle and intelligent pachyderms.
Wild African elephants — including the “super-tuskers” who are hunted for their ivory tusks — roam freely across the border into Tanzania from Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, where their vast herds are protected from poachers.
“The loss of these elephants is not just a blow to elephant populations but to our collective efforts in conservation,” said Cynthia Moss, Amboseli Trust for Elephants founder, as Reuters reported.
Roughly 2,000 elephants roam the Amboseli in Kenya and Tanzania’s Enduimet Wildlife Management Area. Tanzania’s allowance of the blood sport has led to instances where hunters have killed Kenyan elephants across the border.
According to conservationists, the Amboseli ecosystem has the highest density of super-tuskers who have tusks weighing close to 100 pounds, but just 10 of these great animals remain.
“Hunting could cause the super-tuskers to disappear within the next three years,” the petition said, as reported by Reuters.
In 1995, both countries made an agreement that Tanzania would cease the issue of hunting permits following Kenyan elephants being killed by hunters on the Tanzanian side of the wildlife reserve. But in 2002, Tanzania began issuing the permits again, according to the petition.
“Elephants are simply one more natural resource that is being caught up in human greed on the one hand and human need on the other. We somehow need people to become reacquainted with nature or they can have no clue as to the interrelatedness of cause and effect,” said Dr. Stephen Blake, a scientist with the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, on the World Elephant Day website.
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The petition by more than 50 Africa conservation organizations has been signed by more than 500,000 people.
The official theme of this year’s World Elephant Day is “Personifying Prehistoric Beauty, Theological Relevance, and Environmental Importance.”
World Elephant Day was started in 2012 to call attention to the plight of African and Asian elephants as their habitat is destroyed, climate change causes them to suffer from extreme temperatures and lack of water and they are hunted for their ivory tusks.
“We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior,” said editor of Vanity Fair Graydon Carter on the World Elephant Day website.
This article by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes was first published by EcoWatch on 12 August 2024. Lead Image: Elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. HPS-Digitalstudio / iStock / Getty Images.
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