BORNEO PYGMY ELEPHANT

The only places on Earth you will find the Bornean pygmy elephant are the forested areas in the south, centre and east of Sabah, and parts of Indonesian Borneo. Typically standing around 2.6 metres tall, they are distinctly smaller than their mainland cousins. DNA evidence suggests they were isolated from mainland elephants around 15,000 years ago.

The last recorded count of pygmy elephants living in the wild took place in 2010 and placed the number at 2,040, a figure that’s now believed to be below

1,500. Human population growth and the expansion of agriculture are the prime reasons for the decline – over the past 40 years, Sabah has lost 60 per cent of its elephant habitat to cultivation. The elephants are often caught in illegal snares designed to catch small game.

In the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, it’s estimated that 20 per cent of elephants have suffered injury from such snares.

‘Most of the former elephant habitat (flat lowlands, floodplains and river valleys) is now oil palm plantation and the herds are confined largely to marginal habitat of low forested hills,’ says John Payne, executive director of the Borneo Rhino Alliance (BORA). ‘The species is breeding well but there is better habitat for them on private lands than in protected areas, so they come out and have conflict – although much less than you might imagine – with people.’ One solution, he suggests, is to improve habitat for elephants inside protected areas by development of grasslands on degraded sites such as old logging roads and burned areas.