By Matthew Lewis
African elephant extinction is not imminent, says Matthew Lewis. What is imminent are more and more African nations struggling to deal with too many elephants competing with too many people for too little space. And this may be the Elephant In The Room that no one is talking about.
Few species are as iconic as the African elephant, the world’s largest terrestrial mammal. With long lifespans, high intelligence, and complex social structures, elephants evoke powerful emotions in people. Long pursued for their ivory, elephants have also been increasingly exploited in recent years by groups that rely on them for fundraising.
We are subjected almost daily to emotive fundraising appeals telling us that African elephants are on the edge of extinction. One group, calling itself a science-based conservation organization, still fundraises on a claim that 96 elephants are killed every day for their ivory–a staggering 35,000 elephants annually. This claim has been made for at least seven or eight years, despite peer-reviewed scientific evidence showing a continual decline in the rate of elephant poaching since 2012.
Data from CITES MIKE (Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants) and a new study published in the journal Nature clearly show that elephant poaching peaked in 2011 and has fallen steadily since, returning to the lowest levels in a decade, well before the “elephant poaching crisis” became daily news. Despite the facts, some exploitative groups still claim that poaching is pushing elephants to the brink of imminent extinction, which they link directly to their fundraising pages.
The African elephant is categorized as Vulnerable on IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species, not Endangered, and certainly not Critically Endangered. Species listed as Vulnerable are defined by IUCN as “likely to become endangered unless the circumstances that are threatening its survival and reproduction improve. Vulnerability is mainly caused by habitat loss or destruction of the species home.” Note that this definition does not mention imminent extinction, nor does it mention poaching.
