World Elephant Day

Today is the World Elephant Day,  as Elephant numbers have dropped by 62 per cent over the last decade, according to the World Elephant Day website, an estimated 100 African elephants are killed each day by poachers, and several Asian elephants are also in trouble. There are fewer than 40,000 Asian elephants left in the world, which is less than one-tenth of the African elephant population.

In 2016, the proportion of illegally killed elephants (PIKE) dropped below 5 per cent for the first time since 2009, as the prices of raw ivory dropped  more than 50 per cent between 2014 to 2015, a survey  by Save The Elephants (STE), which could decrease the demand that leads to poaching.

World Elephant Day asks people to support conservation policies across the world to help elephants and prevent poaching for ivory trade by improving enforcement policies and conserving elephant habitats and monitoring for better treatment of captive elephants.

World Elephant Day created by Canadian filmmaker Patricia Sims and the Elephant Reintroduction Foundation of Thailand to continue to raise awareness of some of the biggest threat to these mammals today. Sims Documentary “When Elephants Were Young”,  where she follows a man and his elephant who beg on the streets of Bangkok, as this film explores the relationship between elephant and humans and to see if these two can live in a human-dominated world peacefully.