brings back memories of Cecil the lion

Exclusive: German hunter pays nearly £40,000 to shoot one of the largest elephants ever seen in Zimbabwe, while conservationists and safari guides mourn the loss of ‘magnificent’ animal

By Peta Thornycroft, and Aislinn Laing in Johannesburg
12:08PM BST 16 Oct 2015

Read the complete article in The Telegraph

By MARC SANTORA
AUGUST 26, 2015

Read the complete article in the New York Times

MASAI MARA NATIONAL RESERVE, Kenya — Death feeds life on the Mara.

Each summer, 500,000 wildebeests die along the treacherous migration from the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania to the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. And with death come the scavengers, none more important than the vulture.

The New York Times – SundayReview | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD FEB. 14, 2015

Read the complete article

By Michele C. Hollow and Bryson Hull on Jul 8, 2014

Elephant poaching in Africa is now on the radar of the American security apparatus.

The kind of people you’d expect to be talking about terrorists—instead of animals—are urging more military, law enforcement and intelligence efforts to stop the poaching of elephants for ivory.

Read the complete article in WhoWhatWhy

Elephants have more olfactory receptors than any other species

Elephants possess a sense of smell that is likely the strongest ever identified in a single species, according to a study by Japanese scientists out 
this week.

Read the complete article

SAVE THE ELEPHANTS
BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
JULY 7, 2014

… Africa, after years of progress in protecting its wildlife, is again in crisis mode. In 2011 alone, an estimated twenty-five thousand African elephants were killed for their ivory; this comes to almost seventy a day, or nearly three an hour. Since then, an additional forty-five thousand African elephants—about ten per cent of the total population—have been slaughtered. Long thought to be one species, African elephants probably belong to two. Forest elephants, which are slightly smaller than bush elephants, live only in West and Central Africa. Their numbers have plunged by more than sixty per cent just since 2002, and if this trend continues they could be gone entirely within a decade.

Read the complete article in The New Yorker

By Sue LIoyd Roberts
BBC Newsnight

Record numbers of rhinos are being poached and killed in South Africa for their horn. Many of those horns end up being sold illegally for their supposed medicinal properties—in countries such as Vietnam.

Read the complete article in BBC News

A push to stop poaching and save elephants from extinction

Feb 8th 2014 | NAIROBI | From the print edition

SIX tonnes of elephant tusks and ivory trinkets were destroyed in a tarmac crusher in the factory city of Dongguan in China on January 6th. Most of the 33-tonne stockpile of Hong Kong—home to many of the world’s most avid buyers of ivory—as well as those of several European countries will soon meet the same fate. In the past few years ivory has also been destroyed in the United States, Gabon, Kenya and the Philippines.

Read the complete article in The Economist

Scientists believe the group is one of the last chimp 'mega-cultures', sharing a unique set of customs and behaviour

Read the complete article in The Guardian

In this year’s IUCN Conference of the Parties meeting it was stated that IUCN recognized the threat to cheetahs posed by the illegal pet trade. As explained in previous blogs, our fecal detection dog project will assist in gathering necessary information about the region of origin using genetic markers. Currently it is not known if the confiscated cubs originate in Kenya or if our country is the passing route for cheetahs from other countries.