South African conservationist shock over surge in Kruger elephant poaching

Author(s)

Aislinn Laing, The Telegraph

Date Published

South African wildlife officials have expressed shock over the poaching of 19 elephants in the country’s flagship Kruger National Park in the first mass poaching incident for decades that reveals the growing demand for illegal ivory.
The elephants were killed in the north of the park close to the borders with Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Two died at the start of the year, three died in July, two died in August and 12 died in September and October.

Until now, efforts have been focused on keeping South Africa’s vulnerable rhino population safe from poachers: until two elephants were killed last year, South Africa had lost no elephants for “well over a decade”, its national parks authority said.

The latest deaths will raise fears that the country is the latest target of poachers supplying the illegal ivory trade worth more than $1 billion (£656 million) annually, after large-scale attacks on elephants in countries further north.

Most end up in Asia where it is carved into trinkets and given as presents.

Poaching has been blamed, along with loss of habitat, food and water and human-animal conflict for a drop in the number of elephants by 62 per cent in the past ten years.

Every year, it is believed 35-50,000 elephants are killed and between 2010 and 2012, more than 100,000 elephants were killed. Today, there are fewer than 500,000 elephants on the African continent.

In each instance in the latest Kruger deaths, the poachers shot the elephants dead and escaped with their ivory before they could be detected.

William Mabasa, a spokesman for South African National Parks’ Kruger operation, said the lack of borders in the transfrontier park that joins Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa were partly to blame.

He said it was impossible to tell how many separate incidents the elephants were killed in over the past two months in the national park, which is roughly the size of Wales.

“We were picking up carcasses every day, but it’s hard to know when exactly they died,” he said. “We knew to expect this. Most probably elephants are becoming more scarce in the northern countries such as Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique where they have been poaching for some time, so now they have come to Kruger.

“We won’t know exactly how it’s happened though until we catch someone and they tell us why.”