The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants.
It's estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it's a distressing figure.
It's really bizarre because no one knows this, but elephants have killed more animal trainers than any other animal.
Earlier, 100,000 elephants lived in Kenya and we didn't have any noteworthy problem with it. The problem that we have is not that there are now more elephants.
Elephants seek food elsewhere if their route is blocked, and raiding crops and grain stores brings them into conflict with people, often resulting in deaths on both sides.
Elephants are not human, of course. They are something much more ancient and primordial, living on a different plane of existence. Long before we arrived on the scene, they worked out a way of being in the world that has not fundamentally changed and is sustainable, and not predatory or destructive.
Illegal killings of elephants are being linked to organized crime and the funding of armed militia groups. Many consumers in Asia do not realize that by buying ivory, they are playing a role in the illegal wildlife trade and its serious consequences.
Elephant populations in India and also in the whole of Asia are under severe stress. The captive ones are rendered jobless due to changes in the mode of transport and lifestyle of people. The ones in the wild are also no better off, as the forests are shrinking.
The threat of extinction is more real than many realise. And the damage done to elephants directly leads to destruction of the ecosystem.
At independence, Tanzania had 350,000 elephants... in 1987, there were only 55,000 elephants left.
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