A critically endangered baby, a Sumatran elephant in Indonesia, was left behind by its herd when caught in a snare trap set by poachers. Conservation officials said that the baby elephant died two days later despite their best efforts of saving it.
"We couldn't save it because the injury was severe and infected," BBC News quoted Aceh Natural Resources Conservation Agency head Agus Arianto. "We did our best to help it."
The Minneriya National Park, close to Sri Lanka's medieval capital Polonnaruwa, is the world's largest known meeting place of Asian Elephants.
Baby Elephant Loses Half its Trunk
The one-year-old female calf was one of the last 700 Sumatran elephants on the island, according to Penn Live. But the elephant was found very weak with a snare still lodged in her trunk on November 14 in the forested village of the Aceh Jaya district, the Alue Meuraksa.
Arianto narrated that wildlife officials on Monday had to amputate half of the calf's trunk in a life-or-death operation at an elephant training facility near Banda Aceh to save the baby Sumatran elephant's life.
Center veterinarian Rika Marwati said that the calf's passing shocked them because she looked fine after being amputated and was still actively moving. However, she suddenly fell ill from stress in late Monday that on Tuesday morning, she was finally reported dead.
As of now, Arianto told news reporters that a team of veterinarians is set to conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of the sudden death of the baby elephant.
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Sumatran Elephants Listed as Critically Endangered Species
Wildlife conservationists said poaching has become rampant in Sumatra villages since the pandemic started due to economic reasons. In the past nine years, authorities have recorded nine deaths of Sumatran elephants due to snare and poison.
According to The Independent, an adult elephant was found headless at a palm plantation in East Aceh in July this year. The police have already arrested the poacher responsible for the crime, along with four people accused of buying ivory from the dead elephant.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has raised the classification of Sumatran elephants from endangered species to critically endangered species since 2012 in its Red List. IUCN said that habitat loss is one of the driving forces for the drop in the population of Sumatran elephants in the last 25 years, which is equivalent to one generation.
Forestry and environment officials in Indonesia said that data showed that the Sumatran elephants' population has declined from 1,300 in 2014 to only 693 today, almost 50% of the population seven years ago. Sumatran elephants are one of the two large mammal species in the world and a subspecies of the Asian elephant.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reported that pulp and paper industries and oil palm plantations in Sumatra's Riau province had caused some of the rapid rates of deforestation and, therefore, caused habitat loss for the wildlife, including elephants as they were confined in small forest patches.
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