© WWF-Canon / Carlos Drews

Activists say forest elephants -- like this one seen in a forest clearing in the Dzanga Sangha Protected Area in January 2012 -- are being slaughtered amid violent chaos in the Central African Republic.

An "extensive" slaughter of elephants appears to be underway in the Central African Republic with reports of their meat being sold openly in markets, according to activists.

Rebel fighters pushed into Bangui, the capital of the impoverished but mineral-rich country, in March and ousted President Francois Bozize.

In a joint statement issued Thursday, the World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlife Conservation Society said poachers were exploiting the chaotic situation to kill elephants and called for “immediate action” to stop them.

The statement said that “the exact number of elephants slaughtered is not known, however initial reports indicate it may be extensive.”

“WWF has confirmed information that forest elephants are being poached near the Dzanga-Sangha protected areas, a World Heritage Site,” the statement said.

“Elephant meat is reportedly being openly sold in local markets and available in nearby villages. The security situation is preventing park staff from searching the dense forest for elephant carcasses,” it added.

The statement said that up to 30,000 elephants are killed in Africa each year for their ivory tusks, which are in demand in Asia.

WWF and WCS called on the Central African Republic and its neighbors to increase security in the area to protect the elephants and local people.

Jim Leape, WWF’s director general, said “heroic rangers” in the CAR were “standing firm in the face of immense danger,” but added that they needed more help.

“The elephant poaching crisis – driven by insatiable ivory demand – is so severe that no area is safe,” he said.

Staff from WWF and WCS have been forced to evacuate because of the ongoing violence. WWF said its offices in Dzanga-Sangha had been looted three times in the past month.

Dzanga-Sangha, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is home to 3,400 forest elephants, smaller than their cousins on the African savannah with straighter, slimmer tusks, according to Reuters.

Eight conservation organizations working in the Congo Basin have called on the African countries to build up their links with China and Thailand, two of Asia's biggest ivory importers, to find a solution to the crisis, the news service said. Representatives from the region's governments will meet next week to discuss the proposals. 

Rhinos have already been hunted to extinction in the region, Reuters reported, because of the demand for their horns for Asian medicinal concoctions.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Hunted for horns worth more than gold, S. Africa's rhinos face worst year on record

Kenyan police announced on Jan. 15 they had seized the biggest haul ever of smuggled elephant ivory. Two tons of ivory valued at around $1.5 million was stuffed in a container at the port of Mombasa.

"This is a big catch, the biggest ever single seizure of ivory at the port of Mombasa," Kiberenge Seroney, the port's police officer in charge of criminal investigations, told Reuters.

"We fail to understand where one gathers the courage to park such enormous quantities of ivory, hoping that they can slip through our security systems."

Earlier in the month, poachers killed a family of 11 elephants in the single biggest slaughter of the animals on record in the east African country.

The harrowing news prompted NBC News cameraman William Angelucci to pull out a video he had filmed at a unique elephant orphanage in the country.

The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust has been trying to save African elephants since the 1970s. It takes in young elephants that have been orphaned by the slaughter of their mothers and fathers for their tusks. The staff essentially become surrogate parents, feeding the youngsters by hand. As they grow older, for some elephants, humans are the only "parents" they've known.

So far, more than 80 elephants have been reintroduced to the wild after reaching an age between eight to 10 years old. That, however, doesn't end the relationship. The trust’s handlers say many of the animals "keep in touch," and even have brought their own young to visit their human families.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Bazuki Muhammad / Reuters

Malaysian customs officers on Wednesday show elephant tusks smuggled inside wood planks.

Some 1,500 African elephant tusks — the biggest seizure ever — were found this week hidden within timber planks and destined for China's ivory market. Shocked conservationists noted 2012 will now go down as the worst year in 24 years of records — and warned that 2013 could be even worse.

"In 2011 we thought the threats to elephants couldn't get any worse and 2012 draws to a close with the depressing news that the slaughter of elephants hasn't even drawn close to their zenith," said Jason Bell, who runs the International Fund for Animal Welfare's elephant program. "The illegal trade is simply voracious in its appetite for ivory."

Hidden in 10 crates shipped in two cargo containers, the tusks were found Monday by Malaysian customs officials at the port near Kuala Lumpur. The shipment had come from Togo in West Africa.

The tusks weigh about 20 tons, nearly as much as all that was seized in 2011 — a year when an estimated 25,000 elephants were slaughtered for their tusks. For all of 2012, about 34 tons have been seized.

Ivory can fetch up to $1,000 a pound, the World Wildlife Fund said in a new report on poaching of elephants, rhinos and tigers.

"The bloody ivory trade has reached new heights of destruction and depravity in 2012," echoed Will Travers, head of Born Free USA. 

"No part of Africa is now safe," he added. "Across the continent, for the first time, the number of carcasses recorded as a result of poaching exceeds the number reportedly dying from natural causes." 

The groups worry that the start of Africa's dry season will fuel a new round of poaching in the coming weeks. Since 1979, when Africa still had an estimated 1.3 million elephants, the population has declined to an estimated 450,000 in 2007, according to the group Save the Elephants.

Some 150 armed Sudanese men were seen riding on camels and horses across the Central African Republic a few weeks ago and locals suspect they were looking for elephant herds, according to a report on nationalgeographic.com.

Conservationists fear another massacre like the one in Cameroon earlier this year when some 600 elephants inside a national park — half the local population — were killed. 

The tusks from that slaughter were never recovered, Bell noted. 

"It is an indication of an illegal industry completely out of control that lawmakers still have no idea where the massive amounts of ivory poached in Cameroon have gone," he said.

The groups urged the international community to fund a protection plan already endorsed by African nations with elephant populations.

Bell said needed actions include "swift DNA identification of seized ivory, so that we know how and where to point our efforts to prevent further poaching and close down transit routes for smuggled ivory."

Related: Religious groups rally to save elephants, rhinos

China's status as an authorized ivory trading nation is also under fire from conservationists, who want it revoked until it can prove that the only ivory traded is from legally authorized stockpiles.

Born Free, for its part, has started an online campaign at bloodyivory.org to build public pressure against China.

As for the latest seizure, Malaysian officials did not make any arrests but are investigating a local trading company involved with the shipment. It could face fines and any individuals found guilty of knowingly trading in the tusks could get up to five years in prison, customs officials said.

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Dale De La Rey / AFP - Getty Images

Ivory tusks seized during an anti-smuggling operation are displayed during a Hong Kong Customs press conference Saturday.

Hong Kong Customs announced Saturday that it had found 1,209 elephant tusks smuggled in two shipping containers from Kenya and Tanzania. Seven people were arrested in what customs said was the biggest such bust in Hong Kong history.

The tusks, valued at $3.4 million, are used for making ivory ornaments. A single tusk can fetch thousands of dollars on the black market.

Most large seizures of illicit ivory from Africa have originated from either Kenyan or Tanzanian ports.

Large-scale seizures have gone up in recent years -- 13 in 2011, compared to 6 in 2010.

A 1989 ban on the ivory trade helped elephant populations increase, but an analysis of data from 1979 to 2007 found that some of the 37 countries in Africa with elephants continued to lose substantial numbers of them.

Related: Religious leaders organize to stop ivory trade

About 450,000 elephants roam Africa today. In 1930, the number was estimated to be between 5 million to 10 million African elephants. 

Reuters contributed to this report.

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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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IFAW / EPA

Celine Sissler-Bienvenue of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) examines a slain elephant in Cameroon.

At least half the elephants in Cameroon's Bouba N'Djida reserve were slaughtered because the west African nation sent too few security forces to tackle poachers, the World Wide Fund for Nature said on Thursday.

In what was described as one of the worst poaching massacres in decades, as many as 200 elephants have been killed for their tusks since January by poachers on horseback from Chad and Sudan, the fund said.

Rising demand in Asia for jewelry and ornaments made from elephant tusks is understood to be among the factors behind the spike in poaching.

"WWF is disturbed by reports that the poaching continues unabated," Natasha Kofoworola Quist, WWF's representative in the region, said in a statement.

It was the second major elephant-poaching report out of Africa this month. On March 5, the warden at Virunga National Park, a U.N. World Heritage Site in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said poaching had become so severe that rangers began using bloodhounds to track down poachers. The Virunga elephant population has fallen to fewer than 400 from an estimated 3,000 in the 1980s.

In Cameroon, about 20 fresh elephant carcasses were discovered last week, a WWF spokesperson said.

The government of the Central African state has sent special forces to track the poachers and end the killing spree in the north of the country, but the WWF said this may be too little, too late.

"The forces arrived too late to save most of the park's elephants and were too few to deter the poachers," Quist said. She said the organization regretted that a soldier was killed during a clash with the poachers.

Bing Maps

Bouba N'Djida reserve

Biologically diverse and protected only by unarmed rangers, Bouba N’djida is located near Cameroon’s porous northern border, where it presents a tempting target for poachers from Sudan and Chad, the magazine Nature reported. They typically cross into the park on horseback at the beginning of each dry season and return north before rains begin in April, using ivory profits to procure more weaponry.

Legalize ivory trade to save elephants, rhinos?

The International Fund for Animal Welfare, or IFAW, said the scale of this year’s killings was unprecedented.

IFAW said it was not clear how many elephants remained in Cameroon but a 2007 estimate put the figure at between 1,000 and 5,000.

Conservation groups have said the spike in poaching and illegal ivory trade in Africa was a direct consequence of China's investment drive into the continent and as the demand for ivory, used in jewelry and ornaments, grows in Asia.

In South Africa, rhinos are under assault by poachers, who killed more than 400 last year, NBC’s Rock Center reported.

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This article includes reporting by Reuters.

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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.

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. 

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