Poachers have slaughtered at least 200 elephants in the past five weeks in a patch of Africa where they are more dangerously endangered than anywhere else on Earth, wildlife activists said.
The money made from selling elephant tusks is fueling misery throughout the continent, the International Fund for Animal Welfare warned.
It is not known how many elephants
remain in the West African nation. The latest figures from the
International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated there were only
1,000 to 5,000 left in 2007.
The
fund blamed poachers from Sudan, who it said were crossing through Chad
to reach the remote northern Cameroonian wildlife reserve. Ongoing
shooting is making it impossible to conduct a detailed assessment,
activists said.
The fund said
armed insurgents have crossed porous borders on poaching raids for
years, but it called the scale of this year's killings "massive and
unprecedented."
Embassies of
the United States, the European Union, Britain and France had sounded
alarm bells about the slaughter and had called on Cameroon's government
to take urgent action to stop the killing.
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