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Earlier this year, Germany's environment ministry suggested there should be stricter limits on importing trophies from hunting animals. Botswana's President Mokgweetsi Masisi told German media this would only impoverish people in his country. He said elephant numbers had exploded as a result of conservation efforts, and hunting helped keep them in check. Germans should "live together with the animals, in the way you are trying to tell us to", Mr Masisi told German newspaper Bild. Herds were causing damage to property, eating crops and trampling residents, Mr Masisi said. Germany is the EU's largest importer of African elephant trophies, and...

Ancient humans quarried flint to make weapons for hunting and butchering elephants up to 2 million years ago in what's now the Upper Galilee region of Israel, a new study finds.The research answers long-standing questions about why there were so many ancient quarries in the region, and found that they were located near water sources likely used by migrating elephant herds.The study authors propose that Homo erectus — an early ancestor of modern humans that lived from about 1.89 million to 110,000 years ago — quarried flint at the sites to make tools for hunting and butchering elephants until about...

Home to the world’s largest elephant population, Botswana has already gifted 8,000 of the animals to Angola and offered another 500 to Mozambique. For the second time this year, Botswana has threatened to send thousands of elephants to Europe. In March, the southern African nation warned it would fill one of London’s parks with the animals. Now, the president has said his country will send 20,000 elephants to Germany. The warnings have been sparked by a diplomatic row as the UK and Germany mull the idea of stricter limits on the import of hunting trophies amid concerns over poaching. Why...

The Colombian government has announced a raft of measures to control its growing population of invasive hippos—descendants of animals introduced to the country by the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar. Hippos are native to Africa, but in the 1980s, Escobar smuggled four of the animals into Colombia, keeping them at his luxurious country estate, Hacienda Nápoles, in the municipality of Puerto Triunfo—located east of Medellin—which featured a private zoo. As well as the hippos, the zoo housed numerous exotic creatures, including elephants, ostriches, rhinos, giraffes and zebras. Following the death of Escobar, who was killed by Colombian police during a...

An illustration of early humans hunting an elephant using spears. (courtesy Tel Aviv University) When elephants started disappearing from the Middle East some 400,000 years ago, it was a major crisis, and not just for the ancient elephants. Early humans across the region, including in what is now Israel, depended on elephants for their diet. Eventually, humans adapted, learning how to hunt smaller prey such as bison, deer and gazelles, until those, too, disappeared from the landscape or their numbers were too small to hunt. This forced humans to adapt to even smaller prey such as rabbits and birds, and,...

...an international research team led by scientists from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment presents the earliest human footprints known from Germany. The tracks were discovered in the roughly 300,000-year-old Schöningen Paleolithic site complex in Lower Saxony. The footprints, presumably from Homo heidelbergensis, are surrounded by several animal tracks—collectively, they present a picture of the ecosystem at that time.In an open birch and pine forest with an understory of grasses sits a lake, a few kilometers long and several hundred meters wide. On its muddy shores, herds of elephants, rhinoceroses, and even-toed ungulates...

In findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Saint Louis University researchers and colleagues report that elephants play a key role in creating forests that store more atmospheric carbon and maintaining the biodiversity of forests in Africa. If the already critically endangered elephants become extinct, the rainforest of central and west Africa, the second largest rainforest on earth, would lose between six and nine percent of its ability to capture atmospheric carbon, amplifying planetary warming. **SNIP** Within the forest, some trees have light wood (low carbon density trees) while others make heavy wood (high carbon density...

Three elephants have been filmed checking out a hospital as they strolled along corridors in front of shocked onlookers. Clearly there wasn’t much space for the massive animals and one, struggling with a narrow passageway, was forced to go through a set of doors backwards in the Indian hospital. One of the elephants could be seen standing for a while in a corridor of the hospital, and looked as surprised as staff. A person tweeted: “I think this happens when you occupy their habitat and make structures on that. It’s their land and (they) want it back.” Another wrote: “When...

In Ivory Coast a group of conservationists and veterinarians are moving this increasingly endangered forest elephant to an area where the animal is less likely to be targeted by poachers. Scientists have been using DNA testing to track how ivory traffickers are operating. As few as three major criminal groups are responsible for smuggling the vast majority of elephant ivory tusks out of Africa, according to a new study. They’ve develop a combined genetic and statistical method to determine the origin of poached ivory and they are collaborating with the Interpol Working Group on Wildlife Crime to investigate the origins...

This is the incredible moment two six-ton bull elephants clashed in a 10-minute blockbuster battle just yards away from a walking tour. The mighty animals flattened trees as they stomped around and wrestled with their trunks. Chris Bates was on a tour in Kruger National Park, South Africa, when he filmed the incredible clash on the trail.

A herd of elephants that packed its trunks for an unexpected 500km (300 mile) trek has arrived at a Chinese city where millions of people live. The 15 elephants have been hoovering up crops and poking their noses through doors on the march from the south of Yunnan province to its capital Kunming. A big effort - with tonnes of food - is under way to try and keep them safe. It is unclear why they left their habitat to embark on the journey, which has captivated residents and experts. Some have suggested an inexperienced leader may have led the...

A herd of 15 wild elephants was approaching the city of Kunming, the capital of south-west China's Yunnan province, on Wednesday (June 2), defying attempts to redirect them after a journey of several hundred kilometres from forests to the south. The Asian elephants, which include three calves, originally lived in a nature reserve, according to the official Xinhua news agency, and have trekked for nearly 500km along highways and through fields of crops over the past months. More from AsiaOne Read the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite. They were within a few kilometres of...

It started with a petrified tree, half-buried in the mud of the Mokelumne River watershed in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The site intrigued Greg Francek, a ranger for East Bay Municipal Utility District, as he was walking the valley last summer. He inspected further, and what he recently discovered led to one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history. Advertisement "I looked around the area further and I found a second tree," Francek said in an EBMUD statement released this week, documenting the discovery. "And then a third and so on. After finding dozens of trees I realized...

Facing an income shortage from the loss of tourism due to COVID-19, Zimbabwe has announced it will soon start selling rights to shoot 500 endangered elephants this year. “We eat what we kill. We have a budget of about $25 million for our operations which is raised — partly — through sports hunting, but you know tourism is as good as dead at the moment due to the coronavirus pandemic,” Tinashe Farawo, a spokesman for the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, told CNN. The African forest elephant is now on the critically endangered species list and the savannah elephant...

There was something I left out of my last two columns about the orphaned elephants at South Africa’s Pilanesberg Park where I compared what happened there to the fatherless “orphans” in troubled black neighborhoods. Fixing the elephant youth gang problem had a two-pronged solution: policing the elephants with father figures and policing them with humans outside the herd. I wrote mostly about the first, where father figures – adult males – were relocated to Pilanesberg who “kicked butt” to keep the delinquents in line. They took on the role of policeman inside the herd when youthful exuberance threatened to spill...

Officials at a South African national park said yesterday that a man who was suspected of being a poacher was killed by a herd elephants on Saturday. The men were running from rangers when they ran into a “breeding herd of elephants.” The men were reportedly attempting to poach rhinoceros. Only through discipline, teamwork and tenacity will we be able to help stem the tide of rhino poaching in KNP.”

The man was one of three suspected rhino poachers whom park rangers were chasing through Kruger National Park at the time, SANParks said in a news release. "When they realized they had been spotted, the suspected poachers dropped an axe and a bag with their provisions in an attempt to escape from the rangers," SANParks said. The rangers pursued the three suspects with dogs and air support. They eventually caught up with one who said his accomplice had run into a herd of breeding elephants, but he did not know what happened after that. Rangers went to the spot where...

A suspected rhino poacher was killed in an elephant stampede at a South African national park on Saturday, officials said. The man was among three suspected poachers spotted by rangers at Kruger National Park, the parks service said in a Sunday press release. The trio fled when they were seen, and during their escape, ran into a breeding herd of elephants, authorities said.

The genteel surroundings of a Chantaburi golf course were shattered by the thunder of mortal combat between two giants early on Friday. Local police and officials from Khao Soi Dao Wildlife Sanctuary were alerted of wild elephants fighting at the Chatrium Golf Resort in Pong Nam Ron district of the eastern province in the early hours of the morning. Rushing to the scene, they found the body of male juvenile tusker, aged around 6-7 years and weighing over 1 tonne, lying in a dry ditch on the golf course. The animal had suffered deeps cuts and stabbing wounds and was...

Campers in Khao Yai were shocked out of their sleep on Friday morning when a wild elephant invaded the camping ground and killed an old man sleeping in his tent. The elephant ran into the Pha Kluai Mai camping ground at around 2am and entered the tent of Prayod Chitboon, 80. It then grabbed the man with its trunk and flung him against a tree, killing him immediately. The rest of the campers ran to safety. Khao Yai officials said later that the dead man’s car was filled with pomelos and the animal was possibly lured by the load. Officials...