By Rohit Kachroo, Correspondent, NBC News

First came the sound of gunshots late at night.

Then, a few hours later, a carcass was found -- his bloodied face and mutilated body shielded by the long grass. 

Before long, the stench of death was rising from what was now a crime scene.

The rangers at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy seemed almost unmoved. But they have seen it, heard it and smelled it too many times before.

Once again, this 60,000-acre park -- home to one in eight of Kenya’s rhinos -- has been struck by an armed gang.

Despite the helicopters, the dog handlers, the electric fencing and the hiring of a former British Army captain as chief executive, Lewa has struggled with the poachers, losing six rhinos over a four-week period earlier this year.

It is a problem for parks across Africa, where some populations of rhino and elephant face extinction within decades. Gruesome killings, like the slaughter of a family of 12 elephants in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park last January, have caused shock but brought no solutions.

At least Lewa has a powerful supporter. This is where Prince William spent much of his gap year.  It is where he proposed to Kate Middleton in 2010. And it is here that he found another love: the precious species that are under threat from the trade in ivory and rhino horn.

On Tuesday, William will challenge African "producer" countries and Asian "consumer" countries to end the slaughter. But what is the chance of a real solution?

The words of a prince will mean little to the paupers who stalk the parks of Africa in search of a rhino horn which may be worth 30,000 pounds – more than its weight in gold. 

Perhaps stiffer sentences in African countries will make a difference -- but campaigners say that some are resisting pressure to punish those involved in the trade.

Then there's the question of how the meeting dignitaries can succeed in choking demand in the Far East, where others have failed before -- and where horns and tusks are said to have medicinal value.

Campaigners welcome the fact that the issue is being talked about at all -- and they accept that solutions will take time.

But for the majestic creatures that roam Lewa, there may be little of that.  

Animals Asia

Two bear cubs recovered from suspected poachers play at Animals Asia's bear rescue center in Tam Dao, Vietnam.

Two brother bear cubs rescued from suspected smugglers in Vietnam have become poster children for a campaign against the use of capturing and harvesting bears for their bile. 

The two men arrested said "they bought the cubs for $1,500" and were "going to sell them for a much higher price," most likely to a farm that harvests bear bile, Tuan Bendixsen, the Vietnam director for the nonprofit charity Animals Asia, told NBC News.

"To get the cubs they would have to kill the mother," Bendixsen added, "and the mother's body parts would be sold" for the trade in purported medicinal cures from bear parts. The body parts most in demand are gallbladders and paws.

The bears were found by police inspecting a basket in a town near the northern border with China. Across that border are multiple bile farms, Animals Asia said.

The Asiatic black bears, also known as moon bears, were given the nicknames Ricky and Joey.

Releasing the bears back into the wild is not an option, Bendixsen said, "because we don't know where they came from and since they were taken from their mother at such a young age they can't look after themselves in the wild."

Animals Asia estimates that more than 10,000 bears are kept on bile farms in China, and around 2,400 in Vietnam.

"They’re 'milked' regularly for their bile, which is stored in the gall bladder," Animals Asia said in a statement about the rescued cubs. "The bile is used as a form of medicine, even though many herbal and synthetic alternatives are available."

Bears are kept in small cages for up to 30 years while their bile is extracted with catheters, the group said. 

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Religious leaders are the latest recruits in the war by conservationists against those slaughtering thousands of elephants and rhinos across Africa each year. The World Wildlife Fund on Friday announced a partnership with various religious groups — some of which are themselves fueling the crisis by allowing religious artifacts to be made from ivory.

"Halting wildlife trade is a moral issue," Dekila Chungyalpa, WWF’s Sacred Earth program director, said in a statement announcing the partnership with the Alliance of Religions and Conservation.

The partnership was sealed Thursday night inside Kenya's Nairobi National Park, where three dozen religious leaders from nine African countries gathered amid rhinos, zebras, buffalo and ostriches all within site of the skyline of Kenya's capital.

 Standing before a pile of charred elephant ivory as dusk covered the surrounding savannah, Christian, Muslim and Hindu religious leaders grasped hands and prayed. The remains were from a 1989 burn of confiscated ivory that Kenya set on fire to draw attention to the slaughter.  

"We are the ones who are driving God's creatures to extinction," said Martin Palmer, secretary-general of the Britain-based alliance. "We are the ones who can change the way Africa works."

Poachers are escalating their assault on Africa's elephants and rhinos, and conservationists warn that the animals cannot survive Asia's high-dollar demand for ivory tusks and rhino horn powder. Some wildlife agents, customs officials and government leaders are being paid off by what is viewed as a well-organized mafia moving animal parts from Africa to Asia, charge the conservationists. 

Ben Curtis / AP

Religious leaders of different faiths pray around a pile of charred elephant ivory at Kenya's Nairobi National Park on Thursday.

Moreover, poachers can earn hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a rhino horn or elephant tusk. That money represents far more than they could earn after years of labor in the typical village job. 

"Faith leaders are the heart and backbone of local communities," Chungyalpa noted. "They guide and direct the way we think, behave and live our lives," she said, adding later: "I think this is the missing piece in conservation strategies... WWF can yell us much as we want and no one will listen to us, but a religious leader can say 'This is not a part of our values. This is immoral.'"

Ben Curtis / AP

Elephants gather at dusk on March 25 to drink at a watering hole in Kenya's Tsavo East National Park.

It's not known what kind of impact religious leaders may be able to make, but Mike Watson, the chief executive of Kenya's Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, said he and other conservationists will take any help they can get.

National Geographic

Lewa saw one of its rhinos killed by poachers last week. The park had never suffered a rhino poaching death before 2009; it's had five of its rhinos killed since then. 

"We know for a fact that one of the demands for ivory is religious icons in the Far East, and if pressure can be brought to bear to reduce that demand both locally here in Kenya through assistance by religious leaders, and overseas, it can only be a good step," he said. "It might take generations. If religious leaders can some way speed that process up, all well and good, but all efforts need to be on the table." 

The significance of religious icons was underscored by National Geographic magazine, which in its October issue traced how Catholics in the Philippines and Buddhists in Thailand make up part of the demand for ivory.

Chungyalpa said WWF is working with Buddhists to try to educate Asian consumers about ivory and rhino horn powder. Yao Ming, the oversized basketball star from China, visited Kenya last month to raise awareness and make a film called "The End of the Wild," she noted.

Brent Stirton / National Geographic

A master ivory carver works on the head of a Madonna in his studio outside Manila, Philippines. He prefers carving wood but says that ivory has a special quality he finds irresistible — "much high prices."

The poaching numbers are grim. The number of rhinos killed by poachers in South Africa has risen from 13 in 2007 to 448 last year, WWF says. Last year saw more large-scale ivory seizures than any year in the last two decades, it added. Tens of thousands of elephants are being killed by poachers each year.

Chungyalpa compared the effort to enlist religious leaders in the anti-poaching fight to how religious pressure helped end the era of apartheid in South Africa.

"There has to be a rising up of moral outrage," she said. "This is the spirit we're after." 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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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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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."

359 elephant tusks smuggled in ship containers
NBC's Rock Center: Poachers attack rhinos
Bloodhounds used to track poachers
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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."

NBC's Rock Center: Poachers attack rhinos
PhotoBlog: Tagging elephants to save them

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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Wilderness Comittee

Torrance Coste, an activist with the Wilderness Committee on Canada's Vancouver Island, surveys the stump of an 800-year-old red cedar that poachers cut up and hauled out of Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park.

The death of an ancient cedar tree inside a remote park on Canada's Vancouver Island is being showcased by an environmental group seeking more protection against illegal loggers.

The 800-year-old tree was attacked by poachers with power saws over time at Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park, the Wilderness Committee reported Thursday. Cedar is valuable as material for roofing shingles.

The poachers, still at large, were able to cut through 80 percent of the base of the tree -- which had a diameter of nine feet -- before park staff finally noticed what was going on, Wilderness Committee campaigner Torrance Coste told msnbc.com. The damage was so severe that park staff had to fell the entire tree for safety reasons.

The park left the fallen tree at the site so that it could decompose, returning nutrients to the soil, Coste said, but since then poachers "have returned at their leisure without fear of consequence and cut up, hauled out, and taken away the tree in sections.

"This has required seriously heavy equipment," he added. "The area has been trashed, and there are huge steel cables lying around all over the place ... sections of the trunk have been removed up until as recently as two weeks ago."

The Wilderness Committee urged British Columbia, which incorporates Vancouver Island, to beef up funding for park rangers. 

Wilderness Committee

The cedar was left by park staff to decompose at the site, but only this section and a few pieces are still there after poachers got to the tree.

"While the poachers themselves have obviously committed a terrible crime, fault for this incident should also lay with the Ministry of Environment and their long-time negligence of our parks," Coste said. 

The controversy has reached British Columbia's government, with the opposition New Democrat Party criticizing the Liberal Party government, The Canadian Press reported. 

"To suggest that anyone is able to protect all of those areas to the level that the member suggests is fiscally irresponsible," responded Environment Minister Terry Lake.

"I'll tell you what irresponsible is," countered New Democrat Scott Fraser, "10 years ago there were 194 park rangers in British Columbia, there's under 100 now."

The Wilderness Committee, for its part, also fears illegal logging of cedar might be happening elsewhere on Vancouver Island. 

“What we need to know" from the environment ministry "is if cedar poaching is happening anywhere else," Coste said.

A parks official said investigators have little information to work with.

"We have no eyewitnesses or license plates," Don Closson told the Canadian Press.

A police officer echoed the lack of evidence, adding that the poachers were likely after the cedar for roofing shingles.

"It's obviously much more gain than going out and taking a whole pile of firewood," Sgt. Dave Voller told the Canadian Press. "A logging truck loaded with cedar would be worth thousands and thousands of dollars."

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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."

Rangers arrested for killing rhinos, selling horns
NBC's Rock Center reports on efforts to protect rhinos
Rhino dies during operation to protect it from poachers

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.

Workers hold a rhino during a media demonstration at the Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve outside Johannesburg, South Africa, on Thursday. The rhino later died.

A conservation group demonstrating an anti-poaching method for reporters in South Africa accidentally killed the rhinoceros they were using in the demonstration.

The rhino, nicknamed Spencer, went into convulsions and died after he was shot with a tranquilizer dart in front of a crush of TV cameras and photographers who had been invited to document an operation to insert a poison capsule into his horn.

The private reserve near the capital, Pretoria, calls in veterinarians to sedate rhinos so their horns can be treated with a dye and an insecticide, and tracking and identification devices can be inserted.

A male in his mid to late 20s, fairly old for such an animal, could not be revived after being sedated Thursday, said Rhino Rescue Project spokeswoman Lorinda Hern.

"The rhino had an unfortunate reaction to the anesthesia," she said. "Every time you dart a rhino, you take a risk that the rhino might not wake up and unfortunately today was one of those days."

Conservation groups insert poison capsules into the horns of rhinos, which release poison into the horn when it is removed from the animal and are meant to render the horn value-less for hunters seeking to sell it on for use in traditional medicine.

Conservation groups sometimes remove horns from rhinos to deter poachers, as msnbc.com's Dara Brown reported in the video below. The horns are similar to hair or fingernails, and grow back after several months. 

Both anti-poaching procedures require the rhinos to be sedated.

A decade ago South Africa, with more than 20,000 rhinos, was losing about 15 animals a year to poachers. But poaching has increased dramatically since about 2007 as the spread of wealth in places like Vietnam and Thailand has enabled more people to buy rhino horn, which is believed to have magical or medicinal properties in some cultures.

A record 448 rhinos were killed by poachers last year in South Africa, home to the greatest number of the animals. The number was up sharply up from 122 in 2009 and 333 in 2010, according to a report by AllAfrica.com. A majority were killed in the Kruger National Park, which borders on Mozambique, the report said.

"It's sad for us; it's the loss of another animal," Hern said, referring to the rhino's death. "It's a death that I still chalk up to poaching."

Msnbc.com staff and Reuters contributed to this report.

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