Poachers are killing endangered Asian elephants for their skin and meat, not their tusks

A poached elephant in Myanmar. The elephant had been wearing a satellite-GPS collar as part of a Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute study tracking elephant movements to mitigate human-elephant conflict. (Photo: Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute)

Poaching wasn’t the largest conservation concern for Asian elephants, an endangered species, until satellite tracking stunned researchers.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) have found that poaching, not for elephant tusks but for the animal’s meat and skins, is an emerging crisis for Asian elephants in Myanmar. The findings were published March 13 in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

The team first became aware of the crisis while conducting an unrelated study fitting Asian elephants— which are smaller than their African cousins—with satellite GPS collars to understand their movements better and reduce human-elephant conflict.

“It was a shock,” says Christie Sampson, who is lead author of the paper, a doctoral student at Clemson University and an SCBI doctoral fellow. “We started off with really great ideas of how we were going to be able to track the elephants across the landscape. The GPS collars were supposed to last three to five years, but we started losing the elephants relatively quickly.”

The shortest time between an elephant being collared and being poached was six days.

Of the 19 elephants fitted with satellite GPS collars, seven were poached within a year. The toll rose the longer they investigated, with on-the-ground partners finding the mutilated carcasses of 40 additional elephants in systematic surveys across the southern-central region of the country.

With skin torn from their bodies and limbs hacked off, the sight of the dead elephants was distressing for local partners whose main goal is to protect the elephants.

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