What causes elephant poaching?

Every dayMIKE),, thousands of rangers patrol national parks and other protected areas in Africa. Their job is fraught with danger, both from hostile humans armed with automatic weapons and from the unappreciative and potentially aggressive wildlife, armed with tusks, teeth and claws, which they are helping to preserve. But their work is important, not least because the data they collect are crucial to conservation planning.That is particularly true of data on poaching, which remains, in both senses of the word, an elephantine problem. Since 2006 African elephant populations have declined by around 30%. In 2021, according to Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants ( a conservation programme, around 40% of elephant deaths were a result of poaching.