A study by American university ecologists reports that war is the biggest threat to Africa’s elephants, rhinos, hippos, and other large animals.
Lead researcher Josh Daskin, from Yale University, said in Wednesday’s report, Nature, that more than 70 percent of Africa’s protected wildlife areas fell inside a war zone at some point since 1976, some of the areas repeatedly.
The more frequent and serious the conflict, the higher the number of mammal casualties.
“It takes very little conflict, as much as one conflict in about 20 years, for the average wildlife population to be declining,” Daskin said.
Thirty-five percent of mammal populations are decimated annually in areas with the heaviest fighting where people are often poorer and hungrier and resort to poaching.
Landmines and crossfire kill some of the animals, but it’s the changing social and economic stress that makes it toughest on animals, said study co-author Rob Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton University.
Underfunding of conservation programmes makes it hard to counter the destruction of these animals.
While some animals do survive war the researchers found animal populations completely wiped out in six instances – including a large group of giraffes in a Ugandan park between 1983 and 1995 during two civil wars.
Other studies have looked at individual war zones and found animal populations that shrink and others that grow.
The researchers studied 10 different factors that could change population numbers, including war, drought, animal size, protected areas and human population density.
– African News Agency (ANA)
