{"id":4573,"date":"2019-08-15T10:05:02","date_gmt":"2019-08-15T07:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=4573"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:30:28","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:30:28","slug":"the-elephant-in-the-room-too-many-people-competing-with-too-many-elephants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2019\/08\/15\/the-elephant-in-the-room-too-many-people-competing-with-too-many-elephants\/","title":{"rendered":"The Elephant In The Room \u2013 Too Many People Competing With Too Many Elephants"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>By Matthew Lewis<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>African elephant extinction is not imminent, says Matthew\nLewis. What is imminent are more and more African nations struggling to deal\nwith too many elephants competing with too many people for too little space.\nAnd this may be the Elephant In The Room that no one is talking about.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Few species are as iconic as the African elephant, the\nworld\u2019s largest terrestrial mammal. With long lifespans, high intelligence, and\ncomplex social structures, elephants evoke powerful emotions in people. Long\npursued for their ivory, elephants have also been increasingly exploited in\nrecent years by groups that rely on them for fundraising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We are subjected almost daily to emotive fundraising appeals\ntelling us that African elephants are on the edge of extinction. One group,\ncalling itself a science-based conservation organization, still fundraises on a\nclaim that 96 elephants are killed every day for their ivory\u2013a staggering\n35,000 elephants annually. This claim has been made for at least seven or eight\nyears, despite peer-reviewed scientific evidence showing a continual decline in\nthe rate of elephant poaching since 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Data from CITES&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cites.org\/eng\/prog\/mike\/index.php\">MIKE<\/a>&nbsp;(Monitoring\nthe Illegal Killing of Elephants) and a new study published in the\njournal&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-019-09993-2\">Nature<\/a>&nbsp;clearly\nshow that elephant poaching peaked in 2011 and has fallen steadily since,\nreturning to the lowest levels in a decade, well before the \u201celephant poaching\ncrisis\u201d became daily news. Despite the facts, some exploitative groups still\nclaim that poaching is pushing elephants to the brink of imminent extinction,\nwhich they link directly to their fundraising pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The African elephant is categorized as Vulnerable on\nIUCN\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.iucnredlist.org\/species\/12392\/3339343\">Red\nList of Threatened Species<\/a>, not Endangered, and certainly not Critically\nEndangered. Species listed as Vulnerable are defined by IUCN as \u201clikely to\nbecome endangered unless the circumstances that are threatening its survival\nand reproduction improve.&nbsp;Vulnerability&nbsp;is mainly caused by habitat\nloss or destruction of the species home.\u201d Note that this definition does not\nmention imminent extinction, nor does it mention poaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/africasustainableconservation.com\/2019\/08\/15\/the-elephant-in-the-room-too-many-people-competing-with-too-many-elephants\/\">Read\nmore\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}