Melanie Gosling
POACHERS have shot an elephant in the Kruger National Park – the second to be killed for its ivory in Kruger this year – as the price of ivory soars.
This has raised fears that ivory poachers, already well established in countries to the north, may now be setting their sights on South Africa as the next target to supply the international ivory smuggling trade. William Mabasa, head of communications in the park, said yesterday rangers had seen vultures circling in the northern part of Kruger on Monday and had gone to investigate on Tuesday.
“When they got there they found the elephant carcass with bullet holes in the skull and the tusks cut out.”
The elephant was shot in the Pafuri region of the park, near Crook’s Corner where the borders of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa meet.
“The rangers estimated the carcass was about two days old, so that would mean it was probably shot on Sunday.”
This comes after a bull elephant was shot in Kruger in May and its tusks were hacked out. SA National Parks (SANParks) said that was the first elephant to have been killed by poachers in 10 years.
The second incident highlights the risk South Africa faces if elephant poachers move south.
“We are already grappling with rhino poaching here, and we all know that recently countries north of us have been grappling with elephant poaching. It could now be coming down on us,” Mabasa said.
Police are investigating.
Jo Shaw, head of WWF South Africa’s rhino programme, said: “We recognise the serious threats to Africa’s wildlife from transnational organised crime syndicates and call for co-ordinated action to combat it at the highest levels.”
She said there seemed to be a trend of elephant poaching moving south and east from central Africa as those populations were decimated.
Last month an aerial survey in Mozambique, commissioned by WWF, the World Wide Fund for Nature, found that 900 elephants had been slaughtered in the country’s Quirimbas National Park, in northern Mozambique, between 2010 and last year.
At the time WWF’s expert on wildlife trade, Colman O’Criodain, said Mozambique had emerged as “one of the main places of the slaughter of elephants and ivory transit in Africa and as a profitable warehouse for transit and export of rhino horn for the Asian markets”.
WWF in Maputo said the ivory market was run by well-organised criminal networks facilitated by corruption. Mozambique no longer had any wild rhino left, but was “heavily implicated” in poaching rhinos in South Africa.
l Judgment in the trial of Cheng Jie Liang, who was arrested in Table View in 2012 for possession of more than 3 000 pieces of elephant tusk, will be given in the Khayelitsha Regional Court on September 5.