Every August 12th is World Elephant Day, but for you and I every day is a day to celebrate elephants. African forest, and African savannah elephants among others are some of the most inspirational and royal creatures on this planet earth. Seeing and learning about elephants helps us improve our understanding of our world and inspires us to take actions to protect it.
Queen Elizabeth national park that lies in the region where Gender-Environment and development Action works has quite a number of elephants; over 2500 African elephants. They are indeed unique African elephants because they have their ears shaped as the map of Africa, and this fact is an attribute to the name “African elephants”
Elephants play many important roles beyond their obvious majestic presence. They are ‘ecosystem engineers’ helping to shape, modify, and maintain their habitat through their actions. They are a ‘keystone species’ meaning their presence in an ecosystem serves to define that ecosystem to the point where their absence would dramatically change or even destroy it.
These elephants are however threatened in the communities especially poachers, those that look for firewood within their habitat and those that look for their ivory. These are illegal acts that may lead to the extinction of elephants if no serious measures are set forth.
As Gender-Environment and development Action we are doing a number of engagements to save the elephant among which is working with champion primary schools to appreciate the value of Elephants and wild life as a whole through wild life debates and tours for them to appreciate elephants and other animals, awareness raising about the importance of preserving these elephants, working with teenage mothers living adjacent to the national park in alternative livelihoods.
Our call to everyone is to preserve the beautiful elephants as they are good for our ecosystem, tourism among others.
A happy international elephant’s day.
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