Tag Archives: ivory trade

The Republic of Benin has joined the Elephant Protection Initiative (EPI), a coalition of African countries dedicated to the sustainable conservation of elephants and ending the ivory trade. Elephants. Photo credit: planetsave.com The EPI was founded in 2014 by the leaders of Botswana, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon and Tanzania. It has subsequently grown rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa, and Benin becomes the ...

It’s easy to kill an elephant, as hunters and ivory poachers have shown for quite some time. Creating one, however, is an entirely different story. Among the forest elephants in Central Africa, females don’t typically breed until they’re 23 years old – “a markedly late age of maturity relative to other mammals,” notes Andrea Turkalo, a scientist for the Wildlife ...