On The Senseless Killing Of Elephants

A dead elephant in Cameroon

This is beyond profoundly disturbing. It’s about the slaughter of elephants in game preserves in Africa. This story is making me sick. Hence, a too brief essay, for which I apologize, and restraint in writing, so I don’t explode in a torrent of expletives.

MSNBC reports:

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….

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.

This is simply shameful. If there is something that can be done to stop this senseless carnage, let us try to find it. I can't find anything else to say.