African Elephant: Most Endangered animals in Africa
The African Elephant is one of the most endangered animals in Africa.
Researchers at the University of Washington recently said the elephant death rate from poaching was currently 8 per cent, higher than the 7.4 per cent rate which led to the international ivory trade ban in 1989.
Samuel Wasser, one of the researchers, warned that African elephants - largest living land animal- are being pushed into extinction and could be extinct by 2020.
The African Elephant, which can easily consume up to 225 kilograms of fruit, grass, and leaves in a day, is divided into two subspecies: The African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana), and the African Forest Elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis).
The differences between the two are merely on the physical aspect – The African Forest Elephant tends to have rounder ears and is significantly smaller than its counterpart.
Besides poaching, African Elephants faces another major challenge: The calves have chances of dying in a drought, or falling prey to lions and crocodiles.
The population in the 1980s was around 1 million, with around 70,000 elephants being killed a year. The total African elephant population is now less than 470,000.
Sad. Isn’t it? So the next time you go on an African bush safari just take your time in the bush and get as many photos of the African Elephant as possible. You never know. If nothing is done to stop the exploitation of these creatures, then those photos might be used as reference material by future generations.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my Africa travel news feed. I regularly post weired and interesting news articles from Africa!
Email This Post To Friend
This entry was posted
on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 6:26 am and is filed under Hunting.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
