Fauna Journal Entry

Elephants Threatened by Ivory Trade (November 22, 2002)

Africa's elephants are being slaughtered by poachers at an alarming rate. The poachers are mainly interested in getting the elephants' tusks to sell the ivory. In Kenya alone, poachers have already killed at least seventy elephants this year, compared to fifty-four in all of 2001. Elephants are also being hunted in large numbers in Mozambique, where twenty dead elephants were found recently in Niassa National Park.

Making things worse, three southern African nations, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, won a preliminary vote recently at the United Nations Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species. If approved, the vote would allow them to sell their stockpiles of elephant tusks. Such a decision would reopen the world's ivory trade for the first time in twelve years.

The WWF, an international wildlife conservation organization, has been working hard to keep ivory out of the world marketplace. It is concerned that lifting the ban on the sale of ivory will increase poaching throughout the continent. They say this could endanger elephant populations in some African countries.

In the 1970s and 1980s, elephant poaching was widespread across Africa. During that time, the continent's elephant population was cut in half, from 1.3 million to 625,000 animals. In 1990, 150 countries agreed to ban the sale of ivory and other elephant products. Since then, Africa's elephant population has bounced back.

The African elephant is the world's largest living land animal. The elephant lives in a variety of habitats, including savannah, brush, forest, river valleys, and semi-desert regions of Africa south of the Sahara Desert.