2006 Zakouma elephant slaughter

The 2006 Zakouma elephant slaughter refers to a series of poaching of African elephants in the vicinity of Zakouma National Park in southeastern Chad. These killings were documented in aerial surveys conducted from May through August 2006 and total at least 100 animals. This region has a four decade history of illegal killing of this species; in fact, the Chad population was over 300,000 animals as recently as 1970 and has been reduced to approximately 10,000 as of 2006. The African elephant nominally has Chadian governmental protection, but the implementation practices of the government (backed with certain EU help) have been insufficient to stem the slaughter by poachers. The species African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana) occurs in several countries of Eastern Africa.

The most recent aerial surveys were conducted from August 3–11, 2006, overseen by J. Michael Fay, a Wildlife Conservation Society conservationist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence. They found five separate massacre sites. Zakouma is considered "one of the last bastions of wildlife in all of central Africa". Commissioned by the government of Chad and Project CRUSSE (Conservation and Rational Utilization of Sudan-Sahelian Ecosystems), Fay conducted surveys In 2005 and 2006 of elephants within Zakouma, and found populations to decline from 3885 to 3020 animals, significantly offsetting the precipitous increase of the previous six months, although the counting error could not be fully assessed.

Fay reported that he saw five men at a base camp, who ran when his airplane approached. At another time he saw one man on horseback with an automatic weapon, who fired on his airplane. "Zakouma elephants are getting massacred right before our eyes.", Fay relayed to reporters. "We hadn't been in the air more than two hours when we saw our first carcass. It was fresh, maybe just a few weeks old, not far from the park headquarters, and the animal's face had been chopped off, the tusks removed." Fay and National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols documented what they found in Ivory Wars, Last Stand in Zakouma.

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