Poachers kill 300 Zimbabwe elephants with cyanide
Poachers kill 300 Zimbabwe elephants with cyanide
The Telegraph By Peta Thornycroft, and Aislinn Laing, Johannesburg
20 October 2013
Cyanide has been used to kill 300 elephants in Zimbabwe's biggest nature reserve - three times the original estimate - as new photos show the scale of the slaughter
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Workers look at a rotting elephant carcass in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe Photo: AP
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An elephant, a cow and two calves dead at mineral site, Zimbabwe
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Dead elephants at Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe
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Remains of a dead elephant that died after licking poisoned sand from a salt lick which poachers poisoned with cyanide in the Hwange National Park, 610 kilometers north of the capital Harare, Zimbabwe Photo: EPA
Poachers in Zimbabwe have killed more than 300 elephants and countless other safari animals by cyanide poisoning, The Telegraph has learned.
The full extent of the devastation wreaked in Hwange, the country's largest national park, has been revealed by legitimate hunters who discovered what conservationists say is the worst single massacre in southern Africa for 25 years.
Pictures taken by the hunters, which have been obtained exclusively by The Telegraph, reveal horrific scenes. Parts of the national park, whose more accessible areas are visited by thousands of tourists each year, can be seen from the air to be littered with the deflated corpses of elephants, often with their young calves dead beside them, as well as those of other animals.
There is now deep concern that the use of cyanide – first revealed in July, but on a scale that has only now emerged – represents a new and particularly damaging technique in the already soaring poaching trade.
Zimbabwean authorities said that 90 animals were killed this way. But the hunters who captured these photographs say they have conducted a wider aerial survey and counted the corpses of more than 300.