People hunt elephants for several overlapping reasons: the high black market value of ivory, conflict with farming communities, bushmeat consumption, and the economic desperation of communities living alongside these animals. No single motive explains the problem. Elephant hunting is driven by a tangle of global demand, local poverty, and the daily reality of sharing land with the largest animals on Earth.
The Ivory Trade
Ivory is the most widely recognized reason elephants are killed. Elephant tusks are carved into jewelry, decorative objects, and religious items, with the vast majority of demand concentrated in East and Southeast Asia. International commercial trade in ivory has been banned since 1989 under CITES (the treaty governing wildlife trade), yet prices have actually risen since the ban took effect. In the years leading up to 2013, illegal raw ivory in China cost roughly ten times what it did in Africa, creating enormous financial incentive for poachers and smuggling networks willing to move tusks across continents.
The price gap between Africa and Asia is what fuels the supply chain. A poacher in rural Africa receives a fraction of the final sale price, but even that fraction can dwarf local wages. The average annual household income for families near East African national parks is around $1,115. A single pair of tusks, even at the lowest middleman price, represents months of income. For people with few economic alternatives, the math is straightforward, even if the risks are severe.
Poaching pressure has declined significantly from its peak. Data from the CITES monitoring program, which tracks elephant carcasses across 66 sites in 30 African countries, shows that the proportion of illegally killed elephants fell to its lowest level since 2003 by the end of 2020. Central, eastern, and southern Africa all showed strong downward trends, though West Africa’s decline was less definitive. In Asia, poaching rates have remained relatively flat in recent years. The improvement is real but fragile: ivory still commands high prices, and enforcement varies widely between countries.
Conflict Over Crops and Land
In many parts of Africa and Asia, elephants and people compete directly for the same land and food. Elephants are enormous foragers. A single adult can consume over 300 pounds of vegetation in a day, and a herd moving through a smallholder farm can destroy an entire season’s harvest in one night. In northern Botswana’s Okavango Panhandle, for example, crop raiding by elephants is so frequent that the area is classified as a human-elephant conflict hotspot, with regular property damage, crop losses, and deaths on both sides.
The economic damage hits hardest for subsistence farmers who depend on their harvest to feed their families and generate the little cash income they have. Lost crops mean lost food and lost potential income. In Botswana, the government compensates farmers for damage to certain crops like maize, sorghum, and millet, but not for others, including melons. When compensation programs are incomplete or slow, many farmers stop reporting incidents altogether because doing so makes no financial difference. That frustration builds into deep resentment toward elephants, and in some cases, retaliatory killing.
The human toll matters too. In India alone, elephant-related incidents kill an average of 450 people per year. In the state of Chhattisgarh, researchers documented 737 human fatalities and 91 injuries across 19 forest divisions over a multi-year study period. When elephants regularly threaten lives and livelihoods, communities sometimes kill them preemptively or in retaliation, outside any legal framework. This kind of killing doesn’t make international headlines the way ivory poaching does, but it accounts for a meaningful share of elephant deaths in high-conflict zones.
Bushmeat and Food Security
In Central Africa, elephants are also hunted for their meat. Bushmeat (wild animal meat) is a critical protein source across the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries, and elephant meat circulates in both rural and urban markets. A study in the DRC’s Province Orientale found that elephant meat appeared in about 9% of urban bushmeat meals and 4% of rural meals sampled on a given day. In the city of Kisangani, elephant meat was consumed primarily by poorer households, suggesting it functions as an affordable protein source rather than a luxury.
Wildlife harvesting remains deeply embedded in food systems across the region. Despite urbanization and shifting economies, bushmeat continues to play a central role in nutritional security for both rural and urban populations. Elephants aren’t the most commonly hunted species (smaller animals like duikers and porcupines are far more prevalent), but their large body size means a single kill yields a massive amount of meat, making them a high-value target for commercial bushmeat hunters even when the ivory is a secondary consideration.
Trophy and Legal Hunting
A smaller but politically visible category is legal trophy hunting. Several southern African countries, including Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa, have elephant populations listed under CITES Appendix II rather than the more restrictive Appendix I. This distinction allows those governments to issue limited hunting permits, typically to wealthy foreign hunters who pay tens of thousands of dollars per elephant. Proponents argue that the revenue funds conservation programs and gives local communities a financial stake in maintaining wildlife. Critics counter that the money rarely reaches communities and that killing individuals from a threatened species is ethically unjustifiable regardless of population numbers.
Botswana lifted its moratorium on elephant hunting in 2019, citing growing human-elephant conflict and the need to give rural communities more tools for managing elephant populations that had grown to over 130,000. The decision remains controversial, but it illustrates how closely hunting policy is tied to the on-the-ground reality of coexistence.
Why It Continues Despite Legal Protections
International law is strong on paper. All Asian elephants and most African elephant populations are listed under CITES Appendix I, which bans commercial international trade. The U.S. further restricts ivory sales through the African Elephant Conservation Act and Endangered Species Act, with narrow exemptions only for verified antiques over 100 years old or items containing a minimal amount of ivory. Similar restrictions exist across the European Union and China, which closed its domestic ivory market in 2017.
But enforcement is uneven. Many elephant range states have limited budgets for anti-poaching patrols, and corruption can undermine even well-funded efforts. The fundamental drivers, including poverty, food insecurity, and land competition, persist regardless of what treaties say. Research from Penn State University found that food insecurity, not just the prospect of cash, is a primary driver of poaching near East African parks. People who can’t reliably feed their families are more likely to take risks, whether hunting for bushmeat or accepting payment from ivory trafficking networks.
Elephants also range across vast territories that cross national borders, meaning protection in one country offers little help if neighboring countries lack the resources or political will to enforce their own laws. Effective conservation increasingly depends not just on policing but on reducing the underlying conflicts: building physical barriers around farms, designing wildlife corridors that separate elephant routes from settlements, and creating economic opportunities that make living near elephants feel like less of a burden.