Elephant crisis may damage Dar’s tourist trade

What you need to know:

  • The Guardian newspaper said that the clear evidence from the results of a continental elephant census showed that Tanzania’s elephants were being slaughtered on an unprecedented scale.

Tanzania has lost two thirds of its elephants in the last five years and the trade is being fuelled by high level government officials who can’t be prosecuted, according to a report in the UK.

The Guardian newspaper said that the clear evidence from the results of a continental elephant census showed that Tanzania’s elephants were being slaughtered on an unprecedented scale.

“They’d tried to prevent tourists from seeing the melting skins and drying bones littering the Selous ecosystem in southern Tanzania for years,” wrote Guardian correspondent Helen McNeish. “But they couldn’t mask the shots heard from safari camps in a reserve once known as “the elephant capital of the world”.

Last year the area was named in the journal Science as Africa’s poaching hotspot, and a Unesco world heritage in danger site.

The report says nothing is being done about the issue because of high level corruption.