E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
The carcasses of elephants slaughtered by poachers are seen in Boubou Ndjida National Park, located in Cameroon, near the border with Chad.
JOHANNESBURG – Fueled by an Asian demand for ivory, poachers have slaughtered more than 200 elephants in the past five weeks in a patch of Africa where they are more dangerously endangered than anywhere else on Earth, wildlife activists say.
Heavily armed poachers from Chad and Sudan had decimated the elephant population of Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cameroon's far north in a dry season killing spree, officials say.
"We are talking about a very serious case of trans-frontier poaching, involving well-armed poachers with modern weapons from Sudan and Chad who are decimating this wildlife species to make quick money from the international ivory trade," said Gambo Haman, governor of Cameroon's North region.
Speaking on local radio, Haman said some of the poachers were on horseback and operated in cahoots with the local population, who were given free elephant meat and were glad to be rid of animals that damage their crops.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare said cross-border poaching was common during the dry season but the scale of the killings so far this year was unprecedented. "This latest massacre is massive and has no comparison to those of the preceding years," the group said in a statement.
Embassies of the United States, the European Union, Britain and France had sounded alarm bells about the slaughter and had called on Cameroon's government to take urgent action to stop the killing.
Cameroon has dispatched a rapid reaction force to the zone but Haman said there were not enough troops to cover the remote park in Cameroon's far north.
Need for ivory
Citing a record number of large scale ivory seizures in 2011, TRAFFIC, a conservation group that tracks trends in wildlife trading, has warned of a surge in elephant poaching in Africa to meet Asian demand for tusks for use in jewelry and ornaments.
"The ivory is smuggled out of West and Central Africa for markets in Asia and Europe, and the money it raises funds arms purchases for use in regional conflicts, particularly ongoing unrest in Sudan and in the Central African Republic," said the animal fund's Paris-based spokeswoman Celine Sissler-Bienvenu.
Wildlife experts said recently that large seizures of elephant tusks made 2011 the worst on record for elephants since ivory sales were banned in 1989.
The fund said estimates suggested as many as 3,000 elephants were killed by poachers across the continent last year.
The organization warned that countries such as Chad could lose their entire elephant population in the very near future if current poaching levels are sustained.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
More from msnbc.com and NBC News:
Leave a Comment:
Time to kill these poachers on the spot. We are running out of time and running out of elephants !
You can't get rid of the poachers, they are merely merchants meeting the demand of a market.
If you want to stop the poaching, you have to go to the source of the matter
The growing Chinese middle class that still believes in all of this hocus pocus that is driving this, and other species into extinction with all of their new-found wealth.
Poor elephants.
Kill the poachers, along with their families, burn their villages! Enough already, those "poor" poachers. Make it so that no villager on the planet will suffer a neighbor or relative who is a poacher to live. And the shops that sell ivory should be burned as well. With the owner inside.
wonderful well thought out solution Robin
I say castrate the poachers and send their testicles to Asia for ornaments and jewelry.
@ CEO1962
Not a half-bad idea. In fact, get a couple of the "Eastern Medicine" people in China to support the curative properties of poacher's liver and hearts and turn the market against them.
LOL
These poachers must really hate Republicans.
Or perhaps genetically engineer Elephants without tusks
Then we'd have to pay somebody to wait on them hand and foot their entire lives. The tusks aren't there for show.
Jim-769408...Or perhaps genetically engineer Elephants without tusks. GIVE YOU A POINT FOR THAT..LOL
YEAH .....RING MONSANTO
Its a damn shame that black people are still slaves to the others, they are continued to be mental slaves, that don't know what they have , but just to destroyed it to suite some of their former slave masters!.. when these buffoons are caught they must be given the same faith as they give to the elephants!..
The Asian market is decimating not only elephants but rhinos, tigers, whales, sharks, Gorillas and so many other species. They do not have any respect for other species. The treatment of animals in China and other Asian countries is appalling. They skin animals alive in China. There is documentary evidence posted on YouTube by Animal Rights groups. A lot of it is for their folk medicine, especially damaging is the demand by men for aphrodesiacs made from the horns and tusks. They must have a real hard time getting an erection, they are obsessed by this. I am so disgusted by this culture. They also eat a lot of things BEFORE they are dead. This is just so appalling.
Too many people on the planet. Aren't enough legitimate jobs for people to feed and house themselves. The Catholic Church says, "No contraceptives, have more babies." And people listen to this garbage. What happens in 100 years when there are 20 billion humans on the planet, or in 200 years when we have 40 billion people on the planet. Humans be killing and eating each other. We need to get a grip and face reality. We can't go on breeding like rats.
Forget 20 billion,people all over the world will be starving when the population hits 10 billion.Our population will hit 10 billion in 10-20 years.
Once the population hits 10 billion, there will be mas starvation, fresh water sources will run out. Rioting will erupt almost immediately and all social structure will disintegrate. The highly verticalized food distribution will fail overnight and shelves will go bare. Families will first eat their pets, then their neighbors pets then their neighbors, then each other. Cities will go up in flames, all water diverted to drinking, whether it is clean or not. Suburbanites won't have it much better, their homes will be likely targets of those fleeing the cities. Few people left on earth will not have had to take the life of another in order to survive, the population within just a couple of years will fall into the tens of millions, the rest dying first from disease, second starvation, third violent causes. For those who do survive, life will not be much different than it was for our predecessors - the neanderthal. There will be no way to get machines to run except for human power, most animals who didn't flee will have been eaten. Forget about high tech. Nobody living through this will ever download another app in their lifetime. Which won't be very long. They'll be no medicine, few doctors, hospitals will be a flat patch of dirt. So just be fruitful and multiply, like there's no tomorrow. It works.
So incredibly sad! Soon, the only place all these incredible animals will be is caged up in zoos....and of course the circuses where they are so often abused, have even less room than in a zoo and have to do stupid tricks for entertainment purposes.
Hahaha the USA phoned Cameroon to stop the killing of Elephants because, well, we really like Elephants. And we don't have any here, so we need yours. You want to stop the killing, invade Cameroon and protect them like you would if they were oil.
So it's coming down to the wire now...the very last of the megafauna are going down for the third time, drowning under a flood of jumped-up monkeys with the nerve to call themselves "Homo Sapiens".
What's wise about this wholesale slaughter of elephants with automatic weapons?
That's right up there with hunting from aircraft- point and shoot, done deal, land and pose, fly off with your trophy.
What would a truly wise man do at this point?
I suspect he might build a virus making reproduction into a lottery, with only one in five thousand ovarian cycles remaining fertile; after all, an ovum remains the limiting factor in reproduction.
Just for the sheer puckishness of the act, call it an act of God.
Give it an effective life span of fifty years- just long enough for a nice, big bottleneck.
I'd want that delivered in the Middle East first- it would certainly make those medieval idiots appreciate their women more.
Give it at least a three week latency period and extremely mild collateral symptoms, and it'd be all over the planet before anyone even noticed something unusual was going on.
After all, it's only appropriate that the cradle of civilization- and the site of the first man-made deserts- should be the place where we finally got a grip on the lethally idiotic and devolutionary impulse to overpopulate.
People get ready, there's a strain a comin'.....
I, a wise man would suggest engineering a strain of Ebola which is harmless to elephants and can be injected into their tusks. It comes alive when introduced to humans. That will cut demand. Our government has a track record of murdering tens of thousands of Americans during the prohibition with poisoned alcohol, as well as spraying paraquat in the 1970s to maim pot smokers. So how about killing our enemies for a good cause. BTW, anyone thinking China is not our enemy is cordially invited to move there.
They dont talk about the ones they kill because of over populations.
Elephants are threatened or endangered everywhere. There are too many people. There are species rich areas of this planet which have just recently be invaded by humans. It is the height of inhumanity to allow the humans to live in these places. The main island of the Galapagos is a suburb. The Brazilians are burning the rainforests. This scourge of humans in these and other places like this must be immediately addressed. Also note that the proceeds from much of the sale of ivory goes to fund military terrorist organizations. So we need a shooting war with the participants.
Time to poach the poachers - open season on poachers and their henchmen.......... how about we disguise some Bradley fighting vehicles as elephants with a 25MM trunk, two M240C tusks and a TOW missle under the tail and let them go at it?
Jeremy Lin is outraged
What a ruinous effort. He will ruin those ruining the earth.
aren't those elephant more important subject than Syria...it is also a masacre...why don't the west intervene??
Let's just Wheel all folks invovled, from the poachers to the transporters to the buyers. Wheel them, first you wheel their family in front of them, and then you Wheel them.
Only one time the Wheel would need to be used and that'll stop the rest, there is no amount of $ that would justify the risk of meeting the Wheel. Really.
It is starting to become more and more evident that the Chinese and the Japanese do not care about elephants or whales. I do not think a majority of them are educated as to the environment in general. Both cultures continue their glutany of the earth and it's resources. When someting is endangered on this planet lets preserve it! Right?
hello