African elephant poaching threatens wildlife future Three
elephant corpses lay piled on top of one another under the
scorching Kenyan sun. In their terror, the elephants must have
sought safety in numbers - in vain: a thick trail of blackened
blood traced their final moments. In December, nine elephants
were killed outside the Tsavo National Park, in south-eastern
Kenya. This month, a family of 12 was gunned down in the same
area. In both cases, the elephants' faces had been hacked off to
remove the tusks. The rest was left to the maggots and the
flies. "That is a big number for one single incident," said
Samuel Takore of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). "We have not
had such an incident in recent years, I think dating back to
before I joined the service." Mr Takore joined in the 1980s, and
his observations corroborate a wider pattern: across Africa,
elephant poaching is now at its highest for 20 years. During the
1980s, more than half of Africa's elephants are estimated to
have been wiped out, mostly by poa