"Helping save the elephants" by Emily Sohn

According to Sohn, elephants, specifically Asian and African, are becoming highly endangered from people poaching them. The Ringling Bros and Barnum Baily circus have “helped keep Asian Elephants from dying out.” The Elephant Conservation in central Florida works on "protecting, breeding, and studying Asian elephants." Male elephants have huge beautiful ivory tusks. People kill the elephants and sell the tusks for high profits in black markets. Fewer than 35,000 Asian elephants remain in the wild in Asia. Few of them are males, which makes reproducing difficult. Kirtland states “The Asian elephant is going to go extinct as a wild animal because the wild does not exist anymore.” To help the elephants start gaining numbers again they put them in captivity and try to breed them. The trick, they say, is to put a few males in a room full of females so they have to compete for their attention. Some people don’t like the idea of keeping elephants in captivity but “it is proven that circus elephants live longer than zoo elephants or elephants in the wild.” In conclusion elephants are dying out due to poaching and people need to become aware of the problem and help fix it (Sohn, 2003).

Reading this article shocked me because it says elephants could be extinct in twenty years if the poaching is not stopped. I thought the method used for getting the elephants to reproduce was very interesting and I thought it was cool how they found how the method worked. Elephants have gorgeous tusks and it’s sad that people kill the elephants and sell the tusks in a black market. It’s also interesting that elephants in captivity live longer than in the wild or zoo. I think it’s good that people, and organizations, like the Ringling Brothers, are helping elephants and trying to get people aware of the problem. I think that people do need to be more aware and try and make poaching illegal in Africa and in Asia. If we don't try and do something now, elephants might be gone forever.