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Forest elephants in Africa, to some extent, escaped the "ivory holocaust" during colonial times, and the widespread slaughter of their savannah-dwelling cousins for their ivory in the 1970s and 1980s. This was largely because they were hidden away in their obscure forest habitat in the vast Congo Basin.
Stephen Blake is an elephant expert from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, who worked on forest elephants for more than a decade for the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). He says that this habitat is now being chopped up.
"Forest elephants need vast uninterrupted areas of wilderness to range through. But as logging and resource extraction become more important in the region, the animals are squeezed into smaller pockets of forest where they become easily accessible to poachers. There are no good estimates of how many forest elephants remain - probably some tens of thousands, but they are being poached at an alarming rate."
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As resource extraction from central Africa becomes more important, more roads and bigger roads will cut through the forests of the Congo basin. Without effective wildlife management, the elephants will eventually have nowhere left to hide, Dr Blake says. "We have seen some exciting initiatives like the development of national parks and landscape scale management programmes developed over the last 20 years, but the resources needed to manage these areas properly are pitiful compared to those available for resource extraction. I think we've basically blown it."
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12839452
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