Compared to the rest of the Asian countries with
elephant populations, Bangladesh remains the only country in the continent where elephants are regarded as the most threatened and can be only saved from total extinction if their habitats, existing corridors and routes across the borders are secured through a long-term conservation initiative taken in collaboration with the international community.
Before the cull in Kruger, the
elephant population density was 1.
Botswana holds Africa's largest
elephant population, but this is somewhat accidental.
Extrapolations backwards, from a population of over 100 000 elephants in 2000, tell us that Botswana's
elephant population stood at c.
India's wild
elephant population is estimated at around 26,000 and their steady decline in numbers is causing concern to wildlife activists.
So Thailand's
elephant population, which has numbered 100,000 in the last century, is now closer to 4,000, of which about 2,400 are domesticated.
Zimbabwe's
elephant population is once again booming thanks to increased local efforts to combat poaching aided by a worldwide ban on ivory trading.
In their proposal to the forthcoming CITES conference, the Kenya-led group notes that ivory trade is the main cause of the decimation of the
elephant population, which stood at three to five million in the 1930s and 1940s, but had dropped to around half a million by 2002.
The conservation organization is trying to reduce human-elephant conflict around Riau's Tesso Nilo National Park, one of Sumatra's largest remaining forest tracts and home to an increasingly threatened Sumatran
elephant population, by engaging local communities, local government and companies.
In a recent study, Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington, and his colleagues concluded that because customs agents typically detect only about 10 percent of all contraband, the real ivory toll may top 240 tons, representing 23,000 elephants or roughly 5 percent of Africa's total
elephant population.
Between 1979 and 1989 the total
elephant population in Africa was halved.
The authors find that, controlling for other factors, countries with property rights systems or community wildlife programs have more rapid
elephant population growth rates than do those countries that do not, Political instability and the absence of representative governments significantly lower elephant growth rates.
