Poachers kill over 11,000 elephants in Gabon
6 February 2013
Yaoundé, Cameroon (6 February 2013) - A new study confirms what has been long suspected: elephant populations are being decimated to the point that the survival of the species in Central Africa is now in question.
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ccording to a study by the Gabonese National Parks Agency, WWF and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), poachers have killed an estimated 11,100 elephants – between 44 to 77 per cent of the population –in parts of Minkébé’s National Park and its surroundings in northern Gabon since 2004, when it held Africa’s largest forest elephant population.
“The situation is out of control. We are witnessing the systematic slaughter of the world’s largest land mammal,” said Bas Huijbregts, head of the Central African strand of WWF’s global campaign against illegal wildlife trade.
“Some reports lead the world to believe that the ivory war has moved from the Central Africa region to other parts of the continent. This is wrong. What has changed is that these criminals are now also attacking the better protected elephant herds in Eastern and Southern Africa.”
“But here in Central Africa, unnoticed to the world, elephants are losing this war at lightning speed.”
A regional crisis
Fiona Maisels, a conservation scientist at WCS who has been analyzing the survey data, said that the data pointed to a regional crisis.
“The Minkébé data are representative of trends across all remaining forest elephant strongholds in the region, not to speak of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is believed to hold 7,000 to 10,000 elephants, or less than ten per cent of its population twenty years ago,”
Gabon, Maisels explained, represents only about 13% of the forests of Central Africa but is home to over half of Africa’s forest elephants. The Minkébé National Park, in turn, is home to Gabon’s biggest elephant population and to probably the largest forest elephant population in Africa. “At least until these data came out,” she said.
In the Central African Republic (CAR) - which in the mid 1980’s held up to 80,000 elephants – poachers are taking advantage of the political instability to wipe out the country’s remaining elephant, which can now number in the thousands.
Speaking from Bayanga in southwest CAR, Guian Zokoe, who is in charge of the Dzanga-Sangha Protected Areas for the CAR Ministry of Water and Forests, says poachers have killed at least 17 elephants around the Ngotto forest in the south of the country in the past few days. Unconfirmed reports by villagers hint that some sixty elephants were also killed further north, near the town of Yaloke, he said, adding there were reports of killings throughout the country.
“The Central African Republic’s new government has to send its armed forces to stop these poachers before they hit its last elephant stronghold, Dzanga-Sangha, a recently declared World Heritage Site.”
“It is not just a question of protecting CAR’s natural resources, but of stopping these armed groups from waltzing around the country and terrorizing local populations wherever they go,” Zokoe added.
How to end poaching
Although solutions to effectively address the poaching crisis in the region are varied, what can be concluded is clear: left unaddressed, Central Africa’s elephants will follow the footstep of their western black and northern white rhinoceroses, both hunted to extinction.
“Governments in the region such as Cameroon, Chad and Gabon are recruiting more rangers and send their armies to
fight these poachers. But that is not enough,” Huijbregts says.
“The international intelligence community needs to get involved in this fight as soon as possible, in order to identify, track and put out of business these global criminal networks, which corrupt governments, erode national security and hamper economic development prospects.”
But Huijbregts explained that to effectively put an end to the poaching crisis, countries in in East Asia would need to address their exploding demand for ivory, which is resulting in record prices.
“Unless the governments of the region and demand countries treat this issue as an international emergency we cannot rule out that, in our lifetime, there will no longer be any viable elephant populations in Central Africa,” Huijbregts said.
Elephant family wiped out by poachers in Kenya - urgent response needed
10 January 2013
We’re shocked by the news this week that an entire family of 12 elephants has been machine-gunned and butchered for their tusks in Tsavo National Park in Kenya.
It’s the single worst elephant slaughter ever recorded in the country. Kenya’s wildlife service says it’s already on the trail of the poachers and is hopeful they can be caught. But it’s just the latest in a string of barbaric attacks on threatened and prized species like elephants and rhinos across Africa - and we need to see international action immediately.
Drew McVey, our African elephant and rhino specialist, says: “This horrific crime demonstrates the lengths that poachers will go to get ivory – even killing a two-month old calf.
“It highlights the need for the international community to work together to address the global increase in poaching and wildlife crime. Not just in the African states where elephant populations are being targetted, but also in the destination countries, particularly in Asia, where there are consumers driving the demand, as well as in the transit territories through which illegal ivory and other animal parts are being smuggled.”
As our campaigns director Colin Butfield told ITV news today, punishments for those at the top of the criminal cartels involved are “not at all commensurate with the crimes”.
Even though Kenya banned ivory trade in 1989, in line with the international
CITES controls agreed that year, elephant poaching and ivory smuggling have been on the rise again across Africa in recent times - mainly because of growing demand from increasingly wealthy consumers in countries like China and Thailand (usually for ivory ornaments or jewellery).
Tom Milliken of our wildlife trade monitoring partners TRAFFIC has referred to the situation as an "elephant crisis", telling ITV news: “We’re talking about thousands of elephants being killed in a single year - that’s not sustainable in the long-term.”
Source - http://www.wwf.org.uk/wwf_articles.cfm?unewsid=6413
Poaching has traditionally been defined as the illegal hunting, killing or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights. Until the 20th century, mostly impoverished peasants poached for subsistence purposes, thus supplementing a scarce diet. By contrast, stealing domestic animals such as cattle raiding is considered theft, not poaching. Since the 1980s, the term poaching has also been used for the illegal harvest of wild plant species.
In 1998, environmental scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst proposed the concept of poaching as an environmental crime, defining any activity as illegal that contravenes the laws and regulations established to protect renewable natural resources including the illegal harvest of wildlife with the intention of possessing, transporting, consuming or selling it and using its body parts. They considered poaching as one of the most serious threats to the survival of plant and animal populations. Poaching is considered to have a detrimental effect on biodiversity both within and outside protected areas as wildlife populations decline, species are depleted locally, and the functionality of ecosystems is disturbed.
Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching
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