SOS Elephants

An orphaned elephant nicknamed Toto is cared for in a remote Chad village. He was found after some 30 elephants in a herd were slaughtered by poachers.

A three-week-old elephant orphaned when his mother and two dozen other elephants were slaughtered in Chad last month appears to have been adopted by a foster mom, a nonprofit in the Central African country told NBC News.

Nicknamed Toto, the male was being cared for by village officials when he ran away and later reached a nearby herd, said SOS Elephants founder Stephanie Vergniault. 

"Now he seems to have an adoptive mother," she said, but noted "we are not sure she is accepting him 100 percent." SOS Elephants asked local officials to provide volunteers to monitor the situation.

SOS Elephants had initially thought it would have to ship Toto to a protected wildlife refuge in Kenya, but now hopes he'll become one of the herd.

At least 26 elephants were killed in the slaughter on July 24 and the poachers still haven't been caught. Asian demand for ivory products has pushed prices beyond that of gold or drugs, fueling the killing of elephants across Africa.

Vergniault suspects a local ivory-smuggling gang that uses "cars with tinted windows and no license plates" is protecting the poachers with weapons and food.

"They are difficult to find because they do not necessarily need to go to the local villages to buy what they need," she said of the poachers.

Related story: Elephants slaughtered in Chad

"Many (locals) know about the trafficking, including some authorities, but they are so afraid to lose their life that they shut their mouth," she added.

SOS Elephants has urged Chad to provide special wildlife troops and to create a protected area -- expensive propositions for a poor country. 

On top of that, locals would have to be relocated outside the protected area, Vergniault said, and they would need to be compensated with things like a school, medical facility, and/or seeds and tools for farming.

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SOS Elephants

These elephants are part of the herd that saw more than 30 members slaughtered.

The government of Chad said it was searching for poachers who slaughtered part of an elephant herd, while a conservation group said it had found an orphaned infant near the slaughter site.

SOS Elephants, which is based in the Central African nation of Chad, said it had counted more than 30 carcasses in the slaughter on Tuesday.

Poachers on horseback fired on the herd, which was across the river from an educational site run by the nonprofit.

The group said on its Facebook page that since the slaughter happened deep inside Chad it was probably the work of a local poaching gang, not armed groups from neighboring countries. 

Photos posted on the page showed elephants with their trunks cut off, indicating the poachers were after the tusks. The illegal ivory trade is booming across Africa due to demand from Asia for ivory trinkets.

SOS Elephants founder Stephanie Vergniault noted that the slaughter was near an oil refinery run by a Chinese company, CNPC. In the past, she posted, "several of their employees" have been caught at the Chad airport "with ivory in their luggage."

SOS Elephants

One of the slaughtered elephants, with its trunk hacked off.

Vergniault on Saturday told NBC News she had contacted the security chief at the airport and he promised to get "his people to double check all luggage, mainly the luggage belonging to the Chinese."

On the Facebook page, Vergniault added it was "very likely" the orphaned infant's mother was among the elephants killed. "Very sad, very hard moments," she wrote.

Vergniault urged Chad to create a special law enforcement unit to protect its elephants, and stiffen prison time for poaching. "The poachers need to go 20 years to jail, not 2 years!" she posted.

A wildlife activist who has followed the work of SOS Elephants said getting milk supplies for the orphaned elephant will be critical. 

SOS Elephants

This orphaned elephant, nicknamed Savi, did not survive after her mother was slaughtered in an earlier poaching incident. SOS Elephants founder Stephanie Vergniault is with her.

"It's difficult to raise elephants, and one problem is getting the right milk formula -- which is very expensive and is shipped from Europe," Laurel Neme told NBC News.

Nicknamed Toto, the 3-week-old male will possibly be shipped to a large elephant shelter in Kenya, said Neme, who tracks wildlife issues on her website. 

"Hopefully what will happen," said Neme, who noted Toto stands a better chance than another recent orphan, nicknamed Savi, that died.

Chad's elephant population is estimated at around 3,000 — a sharp drop since the 1980s, when it had around 20,000, according to SOS Elephants.

The slaughter occurred as nations that are part of a wildlife treaty met to work out issues such as the illegal ivory trade.

As those talks wrapped up Friday, a motion by some African nations to allow the legal sale of ivory from elephants not killed by poachers was tabled for a later meeting.

Conservation groups urged signatories of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to oppose the move, and to get tougher on the illegal wildlife trade.

TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network funded by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), said elephant and rhino poaching are at record levels and that countries where poaching is rampant should be barred from the international trade in wildlife.

"We should not be shy about using CITES trade suspensions as an international tool to prevent a full-blown elephant crisis," said TRAFFIC's Tom Milliken said in a statement issued by the WWF on Friday.

On Monday, WWF said in a report that "the illegal killing of elephants in Africa is at the highest levels ever recorded, and the epicenter for poaching is Central Africa where elephant populations are experiencing localized extinctions."

Central African governments this week announced a plan to protect their wildlife, but its effectiveness is a question mark.

"It is critical that the plan is rapidly implemented because time is running out for the elephants of this region," Colman O Criodain, WWF’s wildlife trade specialist, said in the statement. 

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Keith Bedford / Reuters

Flanked by other officials, New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., announces guilty pleas by two ivory dealers last Thursday.

When two New York City jewelers recently paid $55,000 in fines and forfeited $2 million worth of ivory trinkets made from the tusks of slaughtered elephants, officials praised it as tough action. But that’s not how the World Wildlife Fund saw it. The U.S. is lagging behind other countries -- even China and its appetite for ivory -- in cracking down on the illegal trade, the conservation group told NBC News. 

"It's really no deterrent at all" to the organized crime rings providing the raw material, said Crawford Allan, who works for the WWF wildlife monitoring program known as TRAFFIC.

For an illegal industry that brings in billions of dollars each year, he added, such fines are "just the cost of doing business."

The plea deals were announced to much fanfare last Thursday.

"This is an international problem that requires local solutions," New York District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., said in publicizing the fines. "In order to curb the poaching of elephants in Africa and Asia, we need to curb the demand side of the illegal ivory trade right here at home."

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The WWF agrees, but feels even more can be done given the severity of the slaughter: a record 23 tons of ivory -- from some 2,500 elephants, were seized globally last year as the population of African elephants continues to shrink. An estimated 450,000 African elephants are living today, down from between 5 million and 10 million in the 1930s.

WWF will single out the U.S. and a few other nations when it starts a campaign in late July to lobby governments to be tougher.

Allan said the U.S. should track domestic ivory sales more closely, set up more sting operations that lead to prison time and go after the sources in Africa, not just the trinket sellers.

"I don't want to belittle Fish and Wildlife," he added, "but they really are under-resourced."

The New York jewelers are a case in point, he said -- they operated in plain sight even though New York state law makes trade in ivory very difficult. Only ivory obtained before African elephants were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1978 may be legally sold and even then a permit is required.

Bebeto Matthews / AP

A photo of an African elephant looms behind miniature elephant carvings on display at the New York City press conference on Thursday.

Moreover, it wasn't an undercover operation, but an off-duty wildlife inspector who happened to walk by the stores that led to the seizures.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which leads the federal efforts to crack down on wildlife trafficking, "can't comment on the specifics" of the case because the investigation is ongoing, spokeswoman Sandra Cleva told NBC News.

In general terms, she added, "we have to prioritize our work" since the service has many more cases than its 220 law enforcement agents can handle.

Allan argued law enforcement must prioritize wildlife smuggling since it is so lucrative to criminal networks.

"Interpol is really getting it," he added, noting that the international law enforcement agency last month announced raids that led to more than 200 arrests in 17 African countries as well as China.

The U.S. reported 212 seizures of products made from elephants last year, and 137 of those involved ivory. The rest were skin and hair products, as well as meat and a few other items.

Only seven of the 137 ivory seizures involved more than 10 items. 

"These results are very much consistent with previous years in that a relatively large number of seizures are documented, but these seizures are dominated by small volumes of non-commercial items," Danielle Kessler, a spokeswoman for international affairs within Fish and Wildlife, told NBC News.

Allan suggested the U.S. could model its enforcement after China, where 13 criminal gangs were broken up recently and more than 1,000 alleged illegal traders were shut down. 

China acted on tips from the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which noted that 100,000 police were deployed in the operation that closed down 7,155 shops and 628 websites.

"There are still issues of corruption wherever you go," Allan acknowledged, "but I really feel that China has realized they are responsible for major issues with wildlife ... the Chinese have woken up to that."

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James Morgan / WWF-Canon via AP

Seized elephant tusks and ivory ornaments go up in smoke Wednesday in Libreville, Gabon.

The Central African nation of Gabon on Wednesday burned all the elephant tusks and ivory ornaments it had in its stockpile -- an amount equivalent to 850 elephants -- so that smugglers, via corrupt government officials, won't get their hands on the black market commodities treasured in China and other parts of Asia.

"Gabon’s elephants are under siege because of an illegal international market," President Ali Bongo said. "I call on the international community to join us in this fight" by cracking down on smugglers and buyers. "If we do not reverse the tide, the African elephant is in serious trouble."

The international wildlife monitoring agency TRAFFIC is among those that fear skyrocketing prices for ivory will tempt more government officials across Africa to join the illegal trade.

"If not managed properly, ivory stockpiles in the hands of government suddenly 'get legs'," Tom Milliken, TRAFFIC's ivory trade expert, said in announcing the burn. "Zambia lost 3 tons of ivory from the government’s strong room just last week and Mozambique lost 1.1 tons in February."

"Gabon’s actions effectively keep the ivory out of the way of temptation," he said.

Kenya last year burned several tons of seized tusks and ivory as well, though that was not so much to deter temptation as it was to send a signal about the rampant illegal trade, where  tusks can sell for hundreds of dollars a pound. 

TRAFFIC's data showed record levels of tusk and ivory seizures last year.

Even before the spike in recent years, Africa's elephant population is estimated to have shrunk from 1.3 million in 1979 to 450,000 in 2007.

Worth some $10 million on the black market, nearly 11,000 pounds of ivory was burned on Wednesday -- including almost 1,300 pieces of rough ivory made from tusks and almost 18,000 pieces of worked ivory.

The international community in 2008 did try to ease the demand -- and the high prices that lure poachers -- by allowing Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe to sell their stockpiles, but prices continued upward.

The same strategy by Gabon would also fail, the conservation group WWF told msnbc.com.

"Commercialization would encourage additional elephant poaching," said Lee Poston, a spokesman for the WWF's U.S. office. "Like illegal drugs, seized ivory has no legitimate monetary value."

Gabon is home to more than half of Africa's remaining forest elephants.

Lee White, head of Gabon's National Parks Agency, said Africa had lost nearly 80 percent of its forest elephant population in the last 20 years. 

"Gabon is the last sanctuary," he said at Wednesday's ceremony, Reuters reported. "For example, there are now 20 times more elephants in Gabon than in the Democratic Republic of Congo, even if that country is 10 times larger than Gabon."

But even Gabon is threatened. Two elephant massacres were reported in the last year and Gabon has had to create an elite military unit to protect its wildlife.

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In neighboring Cameroon, several hundred elephants were killed earlier this year for their ivory -- inside a national park.

China was allowed to purchase tusks and ivory from the authorized sale in 2008, but conservationists say buyers there have abused the system by forging documents.

"It's essential that, given China's insatiable appetite for ivory, its 'ivory trading nation' status be revoked," Will Travers, head of the Born Free Foundation, said in a statement. 

The issue is expected to come up at a meeting next month among nations that are party to a treaty on the trade in wildlife.

The head of the treaty committee testified before a U.S. Senate committee last month, urging the U.S. and other nations to crack down.

A report coming out shortly will reveal that "the levels of illegal killing exceed what can be sustained in all four African sub-regions in 2011, with elephant populations now in net decline," John Scanlon, secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, told the Senate Foreign Relations committee.

Rhinos have also been slaughtered by smugglers after their horns, which are ground up to be used as a purported medicinal powder. The price for rhino horn has made it more valuable than gold.

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Interpol

Ivory ornaments and animal skins are displayed as part of INTERPOL's crackdown on illegal wildlife trafficking.

More than 200 people were arrested and two tons of ivory seized — along with guns, lion pelts, rhino horns and live birds — in the largest operation against wildlife smugglers to date, Interpol announced Tuesday. As sizable as the numbers are, though, the real test will be whether Africa finally sees a drop in the record slaughter of elephants and rhinos.

The three-month operation ranged across 17 African countries as well as China, where officials cracked down on websites and stores selling ornaments made from ivory, the trade for which is banned globally.

"The intelligence gathered during Operation Worthy will enable us to identify the links between the poachers and the global networks driving and facilitating the crime," David Higgins, head of Interpol's environmental crime program, said in a statement.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare helped Interpol by training officers in African countries, and said it also provided leads that allowed China to uncover 700 cases of illegal wildlife trade. 

China "busted 13 gangs, punished 1,031 illegal traders, seized over 130,000 wild animals and their animal products," IFAW said in a statement, adding that 7,155 shops and 628 websites selling banned animals were shut down.

Still, the two tons of ivory seized is just a fraction of what's smuggled each year.

Last year, a record 23 tons of ivory were confiscated -- which means many more got smuggled out of Africa. Those 23 tons probably represent some 2,500 elephants, the international monitoring group TRAFFIC said in a statement.

Report: Tens of thousands of elephants likely killed last year

And this year seizures include 359 tusks, weighing 1.6 tons, found in containers shipped out of Kenya.

In Cameroon, several hundred elephants were slaughtered last January -- inside a national park.

Africa's elephant population is estimated around 450,000 -- compared to between 5 million and 10 million in the 1930s.

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Mike Hutchings / Reuters

These elephants have some protection inside South Africa's Pilanesberg National Park but most across the continent are easy targets for poachers.

Providing the grimmest count yet on Africa's wildlife crisis, the global body tracking endangered species reported Thursday that tens of thousands of elephants likely were slaughtered last year by poachers after their tusks. Rhinos, while fewer in number, also saw mass slaughter as poachers went after their horns. 

Prices for both have skyrocketed due to demand in Asia, where tusks are used for ivory ornaments and horns as a traditional medicine.

The illegal trade is escalating and "pushing these species toward extinction," John Scanlon, secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, said in testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In the case of rhinos, just 25,000 of which are estimated left in the wild, extinction could come "during the lifetime of our children," he added.

In South Africa alone, he noted, 448 rhinos were killed last year -- up from 13 in 2007.

The Senate hearing on the rapid rise in smuggling came as Kenya said that 359 elephant tusks smuggled in shipping containers and confiscated by Sri Lanka had come from its ports.

Scanlon said a report coming out later this year on Africa's elephants will show that "the levels of illegal killing exceed what can be sustained in all four African sub-regions in 2011, with elephant populations now in net decline."

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"We have slid into an acute crisis with the African elephant that does not appear to be on many people’s radar in the U.S.," added Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants. "What’s happening to the elephants is outrageous, and the more so since we have been through these ivory crises before and should have found solutions by now."

Even before the most recent escalation, Africa's elephant population had shrunk from an estimated 1.3 million in 1979 to 450,000 in 2007, Douglas-Hamilton noted.

He urged the United States to press other nations, particularly China and Thailand, to crack down on the trade, and to provide more funds for conservation. "If China would declare a unilateral 10-year moratorium on ivory imports, there would be a future for elephants in Africa," he said.

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AFP - Getty Images

Some of the seized elephant tusks are displayed Wednesday at a customs warehouse in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Three shipping containers found in Sri Lanka stuffed with 359 elephant tusks came from Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service reported Thursday.

Trading in tusks is illegal, and Sri Lanka seized the cargo on Tuesday after it was detected by scans.

The containers -- which had been declared as only containing plastic waste and teak logs -- were destined for Dubai, India and Guatemala.

A fourth container was detained before it left the country, Kenya's wildlife service said in a statement.

Poaching for elephant ivory and rhino horns has risen dramatically across Africa due to demand from Asia, where ivory is used for ornaments and horns used in traditional medicine.

The news came as the U.S. Senate held a hearing on the problem.

Last year was "the worst" in 23 years of collecting data on ivory seizures, the wildlife monitoring group TRAFFIC said in its report for 2011, with most large seizures coming from ports in Kenya or Tanzania.

The rise, said TRAFFIC's Tom Milliken, reflects "both a rising demand in Asia and the increasing sophistication of the criminal gangs behind the trafficking. Most illegal shipments of African elephant ivory end up in either China or Thailand."

Once in Asia, the documentation for illegal shipments is often changed to make it look like a local re-export, helping to hide its true origin, TRAFFIC stated.

"That’s an indication of the level of sophistication enforcement officers are up against in trying to outwit the criminal masterminds behind this insidious trade," said Milliken. "As most large-scale ivory seizures fail to result in any arrests, I fear the criminals are winning."

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On Wednesday, two suspected poachers were shot dead and 32 were arrested, the Kenya Wildlife Service reported, adding that the suspects had shot and wounded an elephant.

The service also listed four other suspected poaching incidents in the last two weeks.

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A 2-year-old boy was killed and 25 others were injured Sunday morning when three elephants broke loose and ran through the famous Koodalmanikyam temple in Kerala, a southeastern state in India, according to media reports.

Sunday was the last day of a 10-day festival and the elephants were lined up to carry a deity to a holy bath before they ran amok, Gulfnews.com reported.

When policemen fired their guns in the air marking the beginning of the processional, Kannan, one of the elephants, became scared and freed himself from his mahouts, or elephant handlers, trumpeting and waiving his tusk. When the elephant started to run, so did two other nearby elephants, CNN-IBN reported.

The elephants frightened the crowd, sending people running for safety. During the melee, toddler Yadu Krishnana fell and was killed. The 25 others who were injured -- most of them during the stampede to get away from the elephant -- were hospitalized.

After half an hour, the mahouts were able to regain control of the elephants, Gulfnews.com reported.

Gulfnews.com reported that some have criticized the government for elephant-related injuries during the Hindu festival.

Watch the most-viewed videos on msnbc.com

Last week more than 50 people in nearby Thrissur were injured after an elephant on parade turned violent, according to Gulfnews.com.

Three years ago, an elephant at the Koodalmanikyam temple ran amok and killed three people. It is unclear whether that elephant was Kannan.

During the festival, elephants outfitted in ornate caparisons carry a deity in a procession to the holy bath of the deity, or arattu, according to Hindu.com.  

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Bloodhounds are being used in the Demoratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park to help stem the massacre of elephants.

Editor's note: This post contains a graphic image at the bottom that some readers might find disturbing.

Faced with a huge increase in elephants being killed for their tusks, governments and wildlife groups have been looking for new ways to stem the massacre. Africa's oldest national park on Monday said it had begun using a new tool to track down poachers: bloodhounds.

While the suspects in one killing got away, Virunga National Park said its first use of the dogs proved that tracking the scent of the tusks can work.

"We are extremely pleased with the outcome," Emmanuel de Merode, chief warden at Virunga said after the dogs led rangers to the suspected poachers in a nearby fishing village. "After a year of intensive training, both the hounds and the rangers proved to be a very effective weapon."

The dogs were deployed after an elephant was found dead inside the park --"the tusks had been hacked out of the elephant's face," Merode wrote in a blog post.

"It was an incredibly challenging crime scene," he added. "The killing had been done four, maybe five days before, and would have been heavily contaminated by scavengers." 

Rangers decided to use the elephant carcass to track the poachers "but the tracks were blended in with the passage of every hyena and every lion in the neighbourhood," Merode wrote in the blog. "On top of that, Dodi and Lily (the two dogs) took one look at the carcass and bolted. It’s not surprising as the carcass looked terrifying and had a horrific stench."

A ranger "spent a good half hour talking to Dodi and reassuring her," he added. "He was able to convince her, and she came in.  He used a bone as the scent item, and after twenty minutes searching for a trail, they took off."

The dogs and six rangers followed the scent of the elephant carcass for five miles to a small fishing village. "A unit of rangers patrolled the area through the night, and in the early morning intercepted a group of suspects who opened fire," the park said in a statement. "After a short exchange, the suspects fled leaving their rifles on the scene."

The park expects its five bloodhounds will have a "significant impact" on poaching. Funded by the European Union, the program brought in dogs trained in Switzerland by a center known for providing U.S. and European police with tracking dogs.

Virunga, a U.N. World Heritage Site located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, had an estimated 3,000 elephants in the 1980s but that's now fewer than 400. The park also is a wildlife haven for hippos and 200 of the last 700 mountain gorillas.

Over the last decade, 150 Virunga rangers have been killed by poachers. Some 300 rangers protect the park covering 3,000 square miles -- an area larger than Delaware.

Legalize ivory trade to save elephants, rhinos?

Driven by demand from Asia, prices for ivory on the illegal market have skyrocketed and that's led to record slaughters of elephants.

TRAFFIC International, which monitors the illegal wildlife trade for governments, doesn't estimate prices for fear that doing so will encourage poaching. But "with demand sky high, there’s likely to be a buyer on hand to pay whatever exorbitant sum is asked for," TRAFFIC spokesman Richard Thomas told msnbc.com.

In Cameroon, some 450 elephants were killed earlier this year by groups from Chad and Sudan suspected of using the money to buy weapons and ammo in their ongoing conflicts. 

"This most recent incident of poaching elephants is on a massive scale but it reflects a new trend we are detecting across many range states, where well-armed poachers with sophisticated weapons decimate elephant populations, often with impunity," John Scanlon, secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species said in a statement.

Under the convention, a fund to help crack down on poaching was begun last August and had received $250,000 from governments through the end of February.

But the convention office urged nations to do more, especially in coordinating efforts. "Save for a few cases where it was possible to make DNA profiling analysis," most seized ivory hasn't been tracked back to the source, the convention office said in a statement. "A national, regional and international approach to manage and conserve elephants is essential."

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Poachers are also going after rhinos, whose horns are in demand in Asia as a traditional medicine.

In South Africa, poachers killed a record 448 rhinos last year. So far this year, 80 have been slaughtered -- a number on pace for a new record.

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LuAnne Cadd / Virunga National Park

The discovery of this slain elephant in Virunga National Park led to the deployment of bloodhounds to track down poachers on Feb. 28.

WWF-Indonesia

A Sumatran tiger cub is photographed by a hidden camera. WWF says the cub was walking through a corridor being cleared by Asia Pulp and Paper in Indonesia.

Is your toilet paper wiping out forests used by tigers, elephants, orangutans and other wildlife? In a report Wednesday, the World Wildlife Fund alleged that a major paper supplier from Indonesia is clearcutting habitat there and targeted a major U.S. distributor to stop buying from that source.

"We found that two brands sold in the United States ― Paseo and Livi ― are made with paper from Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), which is responsible for more forest destruction in Sumatra than any other single company," the World Wildlife Fund report stated. "Paseo is a retail brand of toilet paper, paper towels, napkins and facial tissue, and it is now the fastest growing brand of toilet paper in the United States, according to its marketer."

The distributor, Oasis Brands, didn’t responded directly to the accusation, but defended APP while saying it wants to work with grocery chains to set up a system of monitoring the sustainability of its tissue products.

"Everyone wants the reassurance that the products they buy from Indonesia meet internationally recognized certification standards and are not damaging the precious natural resources of that country," Oasis Brands CEO Philip Rundle said in a letter to the industry.

"Continuous, rigorous auditing has proven APP products are made from sustainable sources and meet well-established sustainability standards," he added. "Now we would like the US grocery industry to see the results of such an audit for themselves. We are confident that APP will meet the expectations of US grocers."

WWF questioned Oasis' defense of the pulp and paper producer. "APP’s forest management operations in Indonesia are not certified as sustainable by any credible third party, "WWF forest expert Linda Kramme told msnbc.com. "There are responsible pulp and paper companies in the US, in Indonesia, and the world over, which employ people and make a profit – all without destroying rain forests."

The group also noted that in recent months eight large retailers -- identified as BI-LO, Brookshire Grocery Company, Delhaize Group, Harris Teeter, Kmart, Kroger, SUPERVALU and Weis Markets -- had decided to stop carrying APP tissue products.

Eyes on the Forest

WWF said an APP supplier was draining this peat forest inside a tiger sanctuary in Riau, Indonesia.

"We applaud each of these companies’ decision to remove these products from their stores," Jan Vertefeuille, head of WWF’s tiger campaign, said in a statement.

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