Elephant Massacre Revealed in Chad - NatGeo

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The remains of slaughtered elephants lie amidst the trees near Zakouma National Park in southeastern Chad. Mike Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist on a National Geographic Society-funded expedition, spotted the animals in early August—two of about a hundred dead elephants seen during a recent aerial survey just outside the park's borders (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society).

Although international ivory trade has been banned since 1989, elephant tusks are hot commodities on the black market. The tusks are actually elongated incisors. Since about a third of their length is inside the skull, the tusks cannot be fully removed while the animal is alive. Poachers therefore shoot into an elephant herd, cut off the trunks of any fallen animals, and hack out the tusks with an axe.

Fay, who was also on assignment for National Geographic magazine, warns that his discovery is evidence of a major poaching problem on the borders of one of the elephants' last central African strongholds. The animals were massacred, his team reports, as they crossed the protected park's borders during the wet season in search of forage.

In 2005 the Chadian government invited Fay and his team to make a dry season census of elephants in Zakouma National Park. The complete count yielded more than 3,800 individuals. But a follow-up survey in 2006 yielded only 3,020 animals, suggesting that either a large herd was missed in the count—or that hundreds of animals had possibly been killed in a year's time.

In a follow-up wet-season survey, Fay and his team found a hundred poached carcasses over an eight-day period. "Even for someone who's been around for 20 years watching elephants be killed in that area, that's a lot of elephants," Fay said of the massacre.

This is not the first time Fay has encountered elephant massacres or poachers. In 1996 the biologist came across a slaughter of 300 elephants north of Odzala National Park in the Northern Republic of Congo.

A herd of elephants congregates at a water hole in Zakouma National Park. The animals' days are generally spent foraging for food in the surrounding savanna. From May to October—the rainy season in Chad—elephants cross the park's borders in search of better forage.

"During the wet season more elephants may be outside of the park boundaries than inside," Fay told National Geographic News. "The corridors they use to leave have been known for a long time, but no one had surveyed outside the park in the wet season."

It did not take Fay long to uncover evidence of large-scale killings on the fringes of Zakouma. His team was in the air less than two hours before they began spotting dead elephants.

A close view of an elephant carcass near Zakouma National Park shows that the face was removed—evidence that the animal was killed by poachers for its tusks. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) estimates that poachers kill 4,000 elephants each year.

Both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are elongated teeth that can grow to up to 9.8 feet (3 meters) long. Before trade bans were put in place, demand for ivory was so great that elephant populations plummeted from an estimated 1.3 million animals in 1970 to just 600,000 in 1989.

During their August survey, Fay and his crew caught glimpses of horsemen who might have been responsible for the elephant massacre.

In one encounter, the crew flew over a suspected poachers' camp several times. On the third pass, a man with an assault rifle fired at the plane as it passed by just 150 feet (46 meters) above the ground. No one was injured in that attack, and Fay managed to snap a photo of the gunner.

The next morning Fay and his team found the carcasses of seven recently killed elephants not far from the campsite. The poachers "are still hammering away," Fay said, "and they will kill every single elephant if [the animals] are not protected."

—Photograph by Mike Fay/NGS