Illegal hunting and the ivory trade have reduced the populations of elephants in Africa drastically over the past century. Millions of these mammals once roamed the iconic jungles, but their long ivory tusks made them targets of big game hunters and poachers who have decimated their numbers by roughly 95% over the past 100 years. The ivory trade drives a brutal campaign of international poaching that killed 22,000 elephants in 2012 alone, despite a global ban on the sale of ivory.
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