Elefantes

In War to Save Elephants, Rangers Appeal for Aid
His name is Baghdad, because of the bullet scar in his ear. He lives in a national park in Gabon, and he's one of only 20 African forest elephantsleft on Earth whose tusks touch the ground, making him worth about a hundred thousand U.S. dollars—dead."That's a sad reflection on our planet," Lee White, head of Gabon's national park system, said Sunday at a meeting of the World Conservation Congress in Jeju, South Korea,where conservationists are appealing for aid from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as African elephant populations plummet.With international crime syndicates coveting more and more elephant ivory—a symbol of wealth in boomingAsia—numbers of the mammal have fallen to "crisis levels," according to a June report by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).The highest rate of elephant poaching since a global ivory ban in 1989 occurred in 2011, with tens of thousands ofthe animals slaughtered, their ivory shuttled out of West and, increasingly, East African seaports enroute mainly to China but also to other Asian consumer countries such as Thailand.About 472,000 to 690,000 African elephants—currently classified as vulnerable by IUCN—likely roam the continent today, downfrom possibly five million in the 1930s and 1940s. On Wednesday, the IUCN Member Assembly will vote on three proposed motions to increase protection of African wildlife targeted for illegal...