SUMATRAN ELEPHANT

The Sumatran Elephant

Indonesia's forests are vanishing at a staggering rate — and with them, the Sumatran elephant. In 1980, perhaps 10,000 roamed Sumatra's forests. Today, fewer than 1,600 remain. In little more than a generation, we've lost 80% of this subspecies.

The Sumatran elephant is the smallest of Asia's three elephant subspecies, but it carries the same intelligence, the same complex social structures, the same devastating loss when a matriarch is killed. These herds follow ancient migration routes that are now blocked by plantations and roads. Farmers poison elephants that trample crops. Poachers kill elephants for their ivory, or simply shoot them when they become 'problem animals.'

What's particularly troubling is how little attention this extinction receives. The palm oil industry alone has destroyed millions of hectares of Sumatran elephant habitat.