ELEPHANTS & IVORY

© IFAW/D. Willetts/Tsavo National Park, Kenya
Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma),
Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. Their
current fragmented distribution covers only a
fraction of their known historical range.
NUMBERS
The total number of African elephants was
estimated in 2007 at between 472,269
(“definitely” known) and 698,671 (including
“probable, possible, and speculative” estimates)
animals. The number surviving in 2012 is unknown.
The total number of Asian elephants was
estimated in 2004 at between 38,535-52,566
animals. An additional 15,535-16,300 Asian
elephants were also said to be held in captivity
worldwide. Current figures are unavailable.
CONSERVATION STATUS
African elephants are classified in the IUCN Red
List of Threatened Species as Vulnerable and listed
on Appendix I of the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), except for
populations living in Botswana, Namibia, South
Africa and Zimbabwe, which have been downlisted
to Appendix II.
Asian elephants are classified in the IUCN Red
List as Endangered and listed on Appendix I of CITES.
THREATS
The major threats to the continued existence of
elephants include:
• The increasing human population, not only
in range states, but regionally and globally.
• Habitat degradation, fragmentation and
loss due to human activities, including –
especially in Africa – those associated with
global warming.
• The existence of national and international
markets for elephant products, particularly
ivory.
• Increasing demand for elephant ivory,
particularly in China, Thailand, and Vietnam;
poaching, especially in Central Africa but
elsewhere as well; and illegal trade, to feed
existing and anticipated market demands.
• Inadequate legislation, enforcement and
compliance; poor governance, and social
and political unrest in some range states.
• The lack of political will by governments, and
the international conservation community
to promote and adopt knowledge-based
approaches to elephant conservation.
ISSUES IN ELEPHANT
CONSERVATION AND
MANAGEMENT
There is considerable controversy about what
needs to be done to mitigate the threats to
elephants in order to protect and conserve the
remaining wild elephant populations. Part of
the problem, which is not unique to elephant
conservation, is that discussions tend to focus on
abstractions of reality, and on myths and fables,
promoted by various participants, each advancing
their own values, objectives and agendas. Issues
discussed here include:
• THE DISCONNECT BETWEEN
SCIENCE, POLICY AND
MANAGEMENT
There is a disconnect between what we know about
elephants and their ecology, the development of
public policy, and the implementation of appropriate
management actions.
Even when scientific information is actually used
to inform elephant conservation decisions, it is done
so in a highly selective and arbitrary fashion. Much
discussion focuses on incomplete and imprecise
data on population numbers and trends, ignoring
that elephants exist not only as populations but as
unique individuals and as components of complex
communities and ecosystems. Important research
from other sciences and other learned fields is
essentially ignored.
Elephant conservation would look remarkably
different today if all our accumulated knowledge
were used to inform policy and management
decisions.
• THERE ARE “TOO MANY
ELEPHANTS”
Although frequently presented as being “scientific”,
claims that there are too many elephants in one
location or another reflect human value judgments.
Science can never tell us how many animals
there should be because no such number exists.
Regardless, when people decide that there are
too many animals, they naturally call for culls to
reduce the number. Science cannot answer the
question whether to cull or not to cull. Scientists
can, however, develop protocols for the scientific
assessment of culling proposals but, to date, no
such protocol has been developed specifically
for the evaluation of proposals to cull elephants.
Instead, where there are more elephants locally
than people are willing to tolerate, the situation
is characterized either as “the elephant problem”
– where elephants are perceived to be having
adverse effects on the environment or biodiversity
– or under the rubric of “Human elephant conflict”
(HEC) – where elephants are having adverse effects
on human activities, e.g. eating crops, damaging
property, or killing people.
Improving the situation for both elephants and
people is admittedly a complex undertaking but
there are signs of progress. In southern Africa, for
example, high densities of elephants can arise when
elephants are fenced in national parks and provided
with artificial watering holes. Remove the fences
and watering holes, and natural density-dependent
population regulation can occur, thereby reducing
local abundance. Another example comes from
Kenya. Over the last ten years, private landowners
have dedicated 1 million hectares of their land to
wildlife conservancies, most of which are critical
elephant corridors and/or dispersal areas.
In addition to reducing elephant densities
locally, an understanding of the elephants’ critical
habitat suggests that HEC might also be reduced
if human settlements and agricultural activities
were not built in the middle of traditional elephant
corridors. Science has much to contribute to the
resolution of perceived conflicts between humans
and elephants, if only we would use it.
• THE QUESTION OF CULLING
In situations where humans decide that there are
more elephants in the local environment than
individual people or society at large desire or
are willing to tolerate, we typically hear calls for
culling programs to reduce the number of animals
in the local environment. This issue is sufficiently
widespread that it deserves further comment.
Culling programs involve either the killing
of individual animals (lethal culling) or their
translocation to other places (non-lethal culling).
Irrespective of the species involved, culling
programs are almost universally initiated without
specific conservation goals; without adequate
scientific assessment; and without any serious
consideration of any alternatives to culling that
might actually achieve the presumed objectives,
both for the target animals and other ecosystem
components, including human society. Almost
invariably, culling programs are initiated without
adequate monitoring schemes that would be
required to evaluate the results of a cull. For these
and other reasons, culling programs rarely if ever
resolve the underlying problems and may, in fact,
make things worse in the longer term.
Culling is one issue that science can actually
help to clarify. At a 1981 meeting that examined
the problem of locally abundant mammalian
populations, the beginnings of a protocol for the
scientific assessment of culling proposals began
to emerge. Now, more than 30 years later, wildlife
culls the world over are still being implemented
without adequate scientific assessment and
monitoring. This example alone reveals the
hypocrisy of governments and agencies that claim
to base their conservation decisions – including
decisions to cull – on the “best available science”.
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