Congo Elephants Even More Endangered Than We Thought

Source: "Elephants in Congo: Big and helpless," The Economist, September 25, 2008.

The forest elephants of central Africa—smaller, with shorter, straighter tusks—may even constitute a distinct species from the African elephants we think of from the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa. The forest elephants are few in number and being poached, in part to supply the demand for ivory from China.

The Congo basin is “haemorrhaging elephants”, says TRAFFIC, which monitors trade in wildlife. The head of the 790,000-hectare (1,952,000-acre) Virunga National Park in eastern Congo, Emmanuel de Merode, reports that 24 elephants have been poached in his park so far this year. The situation is dire: 2,900 elephants roamed Virunga when Congo became independent in 1964, 400 in 2006, and fewer than 200 today. Most have been poached by militias, particularly Hutu rebels from Rwanda who hack off the ivory and sell it to middlemen in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, who then smuggle it to China.

Check out the talk by Corneille Ewango on the Congo forest at TED.