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Small elephants easily get into unpredicted situations.
Even though the Elephants are huge, their kids in their first years are dependent on help and support from older animals.
But even the grown-up elephants are in trouble.
Here you can read more about this.
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Somewhat in the shadow of the climate crisis there is another devastating process taking place, the extinction of numerous species of the planet, leading to a massive recuction of their diversity. Biologists call this the sixth mass extinction. It is characterized by happening in a much larger speed than the previous five, and that it to a great degree occurs because one species has grown to dominate the planet completely. If you take the total amount of body mass of the mammals in the world, mankind today make up for 36% of this, and our domestic animals 60%, so that only 4% is left to the wild animals. You can read more about this in the very interesting book by Dag Hessen "The World at the Tipping Point" and the Pulitzer-winner "The Sixth Extinction" by Elizabeth Kolbert. Except a few species of whales, the elephants are the largest ones of all these mammals. I do not know how big part of the 4% they constitute, but I have found data showing that today there are only around 400 000 elephants left in the world. Of these there are about 350 000 in Africa |
and 50 000 in Asia. That is to be compared with that only 40 years ago there were counted nearly four times as many in Africa (1,3 million). Furthermore, it has been stipulated that around 1900 the population in Africa was about ten millions, and by the time the europeans first came to Africa around 1500 it has been stipulated that it were about 25 million elephants there. In other words, the population has been decreased with between 98 and 99% during the last five hundred years. Regarding other animal life, 68% of this has disappeared during only the last 50 years, according to WWF. Up through the centuries mankind has been over-exploiting the nature around us i very many different ways. One of them has been uninhibited hunting, on the elephants without much other purpose than getting hold of the ivory of their teeth. It is only in the last hundred years or so that there has emerged a consciousness of how dependent we are of all the other forms of life that we share this planet with. |
