STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: An effort to protect elephants, successful for a while, has proven hard to sustain. The Central African nation of Gabon has enjoyed some success in fending off elephant poachers. It set aside a forested reserve larger than the state of Delaware for them and hired hundreds of armed anti-poaching rangers. This effort earned praise from experts like Duke University's John Poulsen.</s>JOHN POULSEN: The Minkebe National Park in Gabon was seen as the unique sanctuary for forest elephants because it was so large and so remote.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: But Poulsen found trouble when he looked at the most recent statistics. He found that Gabon's conservation efforts may not be going as well as they once seemed.</s>JOHN POULSEN: We were really surprised by the magnitude of the poaching and the fact that 80 percent of the population had been killed.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Eighty percent - in hard numbers, that's 25,000 elephants killed over the course of a decade. Poulsen says most of the poachers came from neighboring Cameroon.</s>JOHN POULSEN: What I think our study has demonstrated is that poachers are willing to go anywhere, even into the most difficult environments to poach elephants as long as there is money to be made. What we really need to do is we need to stop the demand.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Now, most of the demand for ivory has been coming from China. Poulsen applauds Beijing's recent decision to shut down the legal trade of ivory by the end of this year.</s>JOHN POULSEN: But even when they stop the legal trade there, there's other countries like Vietnam that accounts for a large part of the ivory trade. And once we stop all the legal trade, we need to start working on the illegal trade.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: That's Duke University professor John Poulsen whose study on the huge decline of forest elephants in Gabon was published this week in the journal Current Biology.
Despite heralded conservation efforts over the past decade, a new study by a Duke University professor finds that 80 percent of forest elephants have been slaughtered in Gabon. Steve Inskeep reports.