Please Help Elephants

Please help save elephants. They are undoubtedly among the most iconic creatures on the planet, and yet they are being slaughtered at a terrifying rate.

For millennia after millennia, they have lived safely in the wild. No predator could threaten them, due to their immense wisdom and sheer size.

But today humans have bullets.

And bullets find as much resistance ripping through those adaptations as your boot would find as it stomped on a big, grey puddle. They’re struggling to cope. Poaching is running rife due to a vast market hungry for their tusks, meat and skin and their numbers are falling.

But there is still time.

If we act now and we can put rangers in place to stop the poaching and their numbers can stabilise.

That’s why we’re asking for donations that could help keep them safe. We need to equip rangers, and a donation from you today could help do that. Your gift could help purchase a sleeping bag for a ranger – enabling them to stay out on patrol, keeping poachers away. Only by stopping the immediate poaching can we buy ourselves enough time to fix the problem in the long term – stopping the demand in their body parts.

So please, make a donation today and help save elephants.

Elephant conservation – in Asia as well as Africa – has featured prominently throughout Fauna & Flora’s long history. In addition to securing the landscapes and corridors of habitat that these massive mammals require, and defusing the conflict between people and elephants that may arise when their worlds collide, we are also addressing the issue of ivory poaching and its devastating impact on elephants.

The ivory trade isn’t a recent phenomenon – witness the naming of Côte d’Ivoire by French merchant explorers as long ago as the 15^th century. Not long after Fauna & Flora was first established in 1903, its founding fathers were already pressing the colonial authorities for an increase in the minimum permissible weight of any tusk intended for sale, saying it would be ‘a disgrace to our age to allow such a fine and noble animal as the African elephant to perish’.

Those words are equally applicable today. The difference is that we’re rapidly running out of elephants to protect. The poaching epidemic – fuelled by rocketing demand for ivory from an affluent and rapidly expanding group of consumers in countries such as China – continues to take a heavy toll. A wave of assaults by heavily armed poachers linked to increasingly sophisticated trafficking networks is posing an unprecedented threat to the future of the world’s largest land animal.

Demand for ivory is by no means the only threat to the African elephant’s survival; habitat loss, hunting for bushmeat and revenge killing in retaliation for crop raiding all contribute significantly to the downward trend. But ivory poaching is without doubt the main driver of the current crisis.

The senseless slaughter of a magnificent tusker for its super-sized incisors is all the more sickening once you gain an insight into the beast behind the ivory. Elephants have the largest brain of any terrestrial mammal, a memory impressive enough to have inspired a proverb, and a complex matriarchal social structure that creates powerful family bonds – they even appear to mourn their dead.

Their awesome physical attributes include a multi-purpose trunk with over 40,000 muscles. This built-in toolkit is capable of plucking a berry from a bush or uprooting a tree. It’s a water detector, power shower, snorkel, drinking straw, extendable arm, trumpet, early-warning system, hand of friendship and defensive weapon all rolled into one.

Saving African elephants – and their Asian counterparts – is not just a moral imperative. The ecological and economic arguments for protecting them are equally persuasive. As a keystone species, they play a unique role in shaping their ecosystem by, for example, maintaining grassland habitat, creating waterholes and dispersing seeds.

So please, help save these marvellous creatures and donate.

Fauna & Flora is the world’s oldest international conservation charity. Over the last 100 years, we have been on almost every frontline of conservation and literally saved species from extinction. We work to protect plants and animals around the globe – never wasting enormous sums of money on excessive publicity or silly gimmicks – instead spending 94% of our income on charitable activities.