By AmandaREO
I'm sure we can all agree on how much we love elephants. Even just saying their name, elephants, makes my heart warm. There are reasons why we love them, but the main reason is this: They're elephants. What's not to love?
Being the largest mammal on Earth, elephants have incredibly big ears, trunks, and bodies. Their trunks can pick up objects, greet other elephants, warn other elephants, and drink water (among many other things).
The elephant community is divided into social structures, led by a matriarch. While the female elephants and the calves live in a group together, male elephants live by themselves or in smaller groups with other males. All female elephants help raise the calves, like a family. They develop strong bonds with each other, and mourn the death of loved ones.
Elephants are essential to many ecosystems and biodiversity. For example, they make pathways through forests for other animals, and their footprints can provide a home for tadpoles and other organisms. A third of tree species in Africa need elephants to digest them for them to grow.
The elephant population has gone from 12 million to 400,000 over the past century. Recently, each year in Africa 20,000 elephants have been killed for their tusks. African forest elephants have declined 62% between 2002-2011, losing 30% of their geographical range. The same sad story can be told for many other types of elephants as well. This beautiful species is killed countless times for only their trunks, which will end up as useless trinkets. It's an embarrassment that we do this: killing a vital species, a species that grieves over the loss of their family, for something as trivial-compared to the elephants themselves-as money.
Habitat loss is another huge threat to elephants. With more human settlement, agriculture, and things like roads, canals, and fences, elephants are losing their habitats and migrational routes at a rapid pace. With humans invading their space, more human-elephant contact is happening. That can lead to the deaths of humans and elephants, which is terrible either way.
I hope that you will never buy ivory, or support illegal wildlife trade in any way. Can the elephants count on you?
For more information go to this link: https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/elephant
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