Elephants slaughtered as poachers run wild

NINETY elephant carcasses have been discovered in Botswana with their tusks hacked off in what a charity believes is one of Africa’s worst mass poaching sprees.

The grim discoveries were made over several weeks during an aerial survey by scientists from Elephants Without Borders and Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks.

“We started the survey on July 10. Each day we are counting dead elephants,” Mike Chase, the charity’s director, said yesterday.

The animals were shot with heavy-calibre rifles at watering spots near a popular wildlife sanctuary in the Okavango Delta. Most of the elephants killed were large bulls carrying heavy tusks.

According to Chase, the skulls were “chopped open by presumably very sharp axes, to remove their tusks”. In some cases the trunks were also removed.

“The scale of elephant poaching is by far the largest I have seen or read about in Africa to date,” said Chase, who added that the poaching coincided with Botswana’s rangers being reportedly disarmed earlier this year.

The country, which has the largest elephant population in Africa at more than 135,000, previously had a zero-tolerance approach to poaching, with a shoot-tokill policy against poachers.