Since the dawn of mankind the elephant has been a source
of wonder and worship. As we evolved, elephants became
our working partners – labored with man as beasts
of burden and even served as our chariots of war. They
have been a symbol of power and royalty and although they
have at times been elevated to the position of gods, they
have also been brutally exploited, killed and mutilated
for items as trivial as bangles and beads and as valued
as the elaborate sculptures made of their ivory tusks
which were a symbol of wealth in India, China, Japan and
sadly many other countries around the world.
This
remarkable creature whose ancestry predates man has now
become an endangered species because of a human predilection to exploit
without conscience. Today’s elephant evolved from
the Mammoth of the Ice Age. As the continents separated,
so did the subspecies. The most significant division exists
between the African and Asian elephants, but there is
evidence that further subspecies once existed that are
now long extinct. In the 1930's a rough census was done
in the African continent which estimated the elephant
population at 5 to 10 million. Today, that population
has been reduced to a mere 600,000 most of that reduction
occurring in the 20th Century – and within those
100 years, mostly in the last 40. The Asian elephant population,
once inestimable, is now represented by a scant 35,000.
Studies
over the last 30 years continually reveal an extremely
sophisticated social order within the elephant family.
Communication, audible as well as inaudible, has been
found to be equally sophisticated and elaborate. How sad
that just as we begin to discover the essence of this
remarkable species, we are watching its rapid decline
to extinction.
This
lamentable disappearance is obviously due to over exploitation
by man, but even more by human over-population. It is
an arguable fact that “the wild” where animals
may survive without human pressure is practically nonexistent
in the world. Therefore, if these precious species, whose
existence reminds us of the planet’s beginnings
as well as its fragility, if they are to continue to exist,
it becomes our greatest responsibility of all to manage
human behavior which seems destined to destroy all within
its reach. The only solution is to maintain a steady effort
to educate people about the consequences of killing off
what is a keystone species.
There has, however, been an encouraging development of
late. An international ban on the ivory trade and
increased efforts to stop illegal poaching have fostered a
rebound in the elephant population in the Tsavo/Mkomazi
area of southern Kenya. where it grew from 10,397 in 2005
to 11,696 in the recent (2008) count, according to the
African Wildlife Foundation. This is an encouraging sign
that the elephant population is rebounding from near
extinction in the 1980s, when the population dwindled to
only 5,000, down from approximately 25,000 in the prior
decade.
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