African elephant poaching
African elephant poaching refers to the illegal killing of these majestic creatures primarily for their ivory tusks, significantly contributing to the decline of their populations. Currently, African elephants are classified into two species: the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis). Despite their status as the largest land mammals, with some individuals standing up to 12 feet tall and weighing several tons, their numbers have drastically decreased due to both legal and illegal hunting, as well as habitat loss driven by human activities.
While some populations in protected areas have stabilized, ongoing threats from poaching and environmental changes, such as desertification, continue to put them at risk. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has labeled the savanna elephant as endangered and the forest elephant as critically endangered. Recent reports suggest that approximately fifty-five elephants are still being poached daily, highlighting the persistent challenges of illegal wildlife trade. Various advocacy groups around the world are actively working to preserve these animals, emphasizing the complex issues related to their migratory nature, which often leads them outside designated protected areas. The situation reflects broader concerns about biodiversity, conservation, and the impacts of human activity on wildlife.
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African elephant poaching
Owing primarily to habitat destruction and hunting, both legal and illegal, the population of African elephants has been reduced steadily over time. Although populations in protected areas have achieved some stability, poaching and progressive desertification have continued to threaten the species.
Elephants of Africa’s savanna regions belong to the taxonomic group Loxodonta africana. The lesser-known African forest elephant is a separate species, Loxodonta cyclotis. Some biologists have postulated that an extinct elephant species may have also previously existed in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa (Loxodonta africana pharaonensis), but if so, it disappeared by the end of the Roman Empire owing to hunting and change.
Elephants are the largest living land mammals known, with male African elephants often standing 3.7 meters (12 feet) tall at the shoulder and weighing up to 6 tons. Both male and female African elephants have tusks. They can live to sixty to eighty years in the wild, possibly longer in captivity. Female elephants are highly social, living in groups led by the eldest female, to whom they are generally related, with the adult males usually living alone on the group perimeter, although bachelor herds also exist for periods of time.
Although the primary habitat of the largest group of African elephants is the great savanna, elephants have historically ranged across the entire African continent, south of the great Sahara. They were, at one time, ubiquitous in this geographic region, but African elephant populations have shrunk greatly in the past two centuries because of human activity, including both hunting and poaching, primarily for their ivory tusks, and habitat loss—resulting from land mismanagement and climatic aridization. Estimated around 1980 as numbering up to 1.3 million (though quite a few experts believe this number was inflated), by 2016 they numbered around 415,000. In 2021, the International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the African savanna elephant as endangered and the African forest elephant as critically endangered. Habitat loss for African elephants owing to and also continued to be considered highly problematic for wild populations, especially if desertification continued at the rates seen since the late twentieth century.
Trade in ivory has been mostly banned since 1989 by the UN-backed Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), but illicit trade continued in politically unstable parts of Africa, and some countries, including the United States until 2016 and China until 2018, had retained legal markets. One of the most egregious single incidents of deliberate elephant poaching took place in southeastern Chad in 2006 just outside Zakouma National Park, where more than one hundred elephants were slaughtered for ivory. It is estimated that 96 percent of the 300,000 Chadian elephant population was lost between 1970 and 2010, when numbers were down to approximately 10,000 elephants in Zakouma National Park. By the early 2020s, despite some decline in poaching activity since its peak in the early 2010s, the organization TRAFFIC, which works to ensure legal and sustainable trading in wild species, was reporting that around fifty-five African elephants were being poached every day. Observing additional impacts of poaching, researchers in 2021 published findings in which they linked an increase in tuskless African elephants in Mozambique to the extreme incidences of poaching that occurred during the country's civil war between the 1970s and 1990s.
Individuals and organizations across the world have advocated for African elephant preservation. Because elephants are migratory, following water and plant seasons, they can cover a territory of up to 3,600 square kilometers (about 1,400 square miles), which is problematic when they leave protected areas where hunting is forbidden.
Bibliography
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