URGENT The Mali Elephants Need Your Help!

The Mali Elephants Need Your Help

Greetings!

In this newsletter we salute the efforts of the communities living with the Mali elephants and transmit a message from them to you. With your help, our work continues despite the rebellion and the coup. Communities have protected all project assets from rebels and opportunists, as for example in preventing the camels used by the community patrols from being taken, and retrieving stolen solar panels, but because of the lack of government presence, poaching has arrived in the Gourma for the first time.

Since January, three elephants have been killed and their tusks removed. The first of these incidents occurred before the coup, and we financed a mission of government foresters to find the perpetrators. This was successful because of information gleaned through our community information system that discovered the identities of the perpetrators and their immediate links.

Communities in the Gourma echo official government requests to crack down on poaching immediately, and prevent another massacre by deploying an armed anti-poaching rapid-response unit that can act on this information. The communities are organized; they just need the backup. For this we need to raise $20,000 just to cover some of the costs of one rapid-response unit.

Our project efforts over the past decade and your support have helped this elephant population survive against all the odds. Donate now to help protect the desert elephants of Mali! Click here to make your gift.

Sincerely,

Dr. Susan Canney

Project Leader, Mali Elephant Project

Help Combat Elephant Poaching!

The west-African country of Mali is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. It also has one of the most unique, endangered, and valuable elephant herds in the world. Comprised of around 550 individual animals existing primarily in the Gourma Region of Central Mali, this northern-most herd has the longest annual elephant migration ever recorded.

The tolerance of the elephants by local people, the isolation of the region, and their small, low-quality tusks, helped this population largely escape the intense poaching of the 1980s that extirpated all other elephants that once existed across the Sahel. This situation may now be changing.

"If the elephants disappear, our area will no longer be special."

- Local Villager

We are alarmed at the sudden number of poaching incidents that are historically unheard of. Communities in the Gourma have requested that we crack down on poaching immediately to send a strong signal to the perpetrators to prevent another massacre.

The national government has officially requested our help. Our response is to:

Develop an information gathering network by training local communities in information gathering and reporting.
Train, equip, and deploy an armed anti-poaching rapid-response unit who will respond to information gathered by locals.

Can you help us reach our goal of raising $20,000? This will cover the training and supplies of one rapid-response unit. One team will be deployed as an immediate response that moves with the elephants, but the area is vast and if poaching increases, three teams of 12 people will be required to cover the whole elephant range.

The elephants of Mali need your help! Will you help protect this unique and threatened herd? Click here to make your donation to protect the elephants.

> LEARN MORE

Video interview with
Dr. Susan Canney