Question: What is you view on poaching, especially with elephants? What do you think is the best way to help to prevent it?

Ellen Williams answered on 8 Mar 2017:

An excellent question but so so sad that it needs asking 🙁 I of course cannot abide poaching. The manner it is carried out is usually barbaric and animals are left suffering. That is before you even look at the effect it is having on populations (driving animals to extinction and in elephants causing skewed sex ratios). Poachers are even now going one step further as we saw in France just yesterday. I really don’t know how best to prevent it – there is a lot of money in the illegal wildlife trade and unfortunately there is also a lot of corruption within some governments. When the trade is driven by beliefs related to holistic medicine it is again even more difficult – we, as people in the western world, know that there is no science behind the claims that animal parts can cure diseases or infertility, but the people buying them may not know that. I think education programmes are key, but also extensive protection programmes. I really hope that we (as a whole world) can stop poaching before we lose anymore species though!