Baby Asian Elephants Are Being Crippled by Snares

Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains, blanketed in emerald-green rain forest, should be a haven for endangered Asian elephants. But cameras triggered by motion sensors reveal that most of the baby elephants in the region have been injured, some fatally, by wire traps intended for other animals.


Thousands of snares litter the stomping grounds of the Cardamoms’ resident elephants. Hunters set them in order to feed the nation’s growing demand for bush meat from illegally caught wild animals, especially wild pigs and deer. The snares often inadvertently cripple or kill other animals.


Local people believed the contraptions were not harming the elephants, according to Jackson Frechette, flagship species manager for Fauna & Flora International Cambodia, a wildlife conservation organization. “They thought elephants ripped their snares off without getting hurt,” he says.


But the 51 camera traps Frechette and his team deployed beginning in 2016 told a different story. They captured photos and videos of nearly all 45 members of the region’s core elephant population. Of the seven babies less than a year old that the researchers identified, four could be seen hobbling with severe limps and wires cinching their lower legs. The team reports the findings in the July issue of the journal Oryx.


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