“We let him slip away,” breathes Louis Diakité, discouraged. At the beginning of March, the founder of the N'Zi River Lodges private reserve located in the center of Côte d'Ivoire, near Bouaké, decided to give up pursuing “le Gros”, a forest elephant of around ten of years. Heartbreaking. This former hunter, converted to wildlife conservation, wanted to welcome him to his ecotourism site which already hosts buffalo, antelopes and a rhino.
The pachyderm, although adopted by the local villagers who gave it this nickname, had recently been threatened. Some wanted to kill him after he caused the death of a man in November 2023. Despite the significant resources deployed to shelter him, “the Fat One” escaped his enclosure six times. reserve. This series, which has lasted for several months, crystallizes the issues surrounding the elephant, emblem of an entire country.
The N'Zi River Lodges private reserve, crossed by the N'zi River, in Ivory Coast, January 28, 2024 PAUL LEMAIRE/HORS-FORMAT FOR “LE MONDE”
Because, and this is a paradox, in Côte d'Ivoire, the elephant, although officially protected and a source of national pride – the football team, crowned African champion in February, is nicknamed the Elephants, thus that many hotels and businesses which are named after the pachyderm – is also seriously threatened. While the State reported nearly “100,000 (individuals) in the 1960s”, a report published in 2020 by Ivorian researchers in the journal Plos One estimated that there were 225 in the country. A decline measured between 2011 and 2017 using excrement, conflicts between humans and elephants, and interviews with field workers, described as “widespread and catastrophic”.
3.5 meters at the withers
Colonel Salimata Koné, director of wildlife and hunting resources at the Ministry of Water and Forests, assures, for her part, map of Côte d'Ivoire in hand, that the elephants are still around 500, or still twice as many less than twenty years ago. Most are forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis). Measuring 3.5 meters maximum at the withers, they are smaller than their savannah cousins (Loxodonta africana) – which are found in small numbers in the center of the country. At home in the cool forests of Central and West Africa, they are often difficult to locate in their natural habitat.
Pierre Kignon, secretary of the chiefdom of the village of Massa (Ivory Coast), January 20, 2024. PAUL LEMAIRE/HORS-FORMAT FOR “LE MONDE”
This is not the case of the “Big One”, who, on the contrary, has gotten into the habit of approaching the villages. “He had been in the area for nine years,” remembers Pierre Kignon, secretary of the chiefdom of the village of Massa, in central-west Ivory Coast. When he came too close to us, we asked him for forgiveness and, normally, he would turn back. » But in November 2023, while looking for food, the animal killed the village elder. “I saw the elephant standing there in front of his hut, he was eating the cocoa beans that were drying,” testifies the man who is also the nephew of the deceased. After ten minutes, he broke into the house where the old man was sleeping. Then begins an animal hunt. The villagers attack him with machetes and severely cut his tail. His days seem numbered.
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