Elephants could be wiped out across Africa in 10 to 15 years if poaching continues at its current pace, Ginny Stein of ABC News reports.
Poachers are outnumbering and outgunning rangers in elephant havens like the Garamba National Park in the Republic of Congo, leading to the slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants each year.
As much as 70 percent of the illegal ivory feeds insatiable demand in China.
"We are going to lose the largest animal on earth just so people can have trinkets," Cynthia Moss, an American conservationist who has spent the past 30 years studying elephants in Kenya, told ABC News.
Infamous warlord Joseph Kony's Lords Resistance army has turned to killing elephants for their ivory tusks as their main source of income.
Stein notes that there are now only an estimated 2,500 elephants remaining from a herd once as large as 20,000. But saving the elephant will be a tough task.
"You would have to have a huge army and it still might not work and you have to stop the demand, you have to raise the consciousness of people in the far east to tell them, 'do not buy ivory, it kills elephants'," Moss said.
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