Saving Africa’s Wildlife

African Parks aims to restore populations that once existed in some of the world’s most remote places.

KEVIN SIEFF: ‘By almost any measure, Africa’s wildlife has suffered immensely in recent decades. Over 90 percent of the continent’s elephants have vanished over the last century. The lion population has crashed by more than 40 percent since 1993. There are fewer than 1,000 mountain gorillas in the wild. There are only two northern white rhinos in existence…

African Parks, the nonprofit organization that arranges the shipments of the animals, aims to restore populations that once existed in some of the world’s most remote places. It has trucked 520 elephants across Malawi. It flew 20 black rhinos from South Africa to Rwanda. This month, it started bringing rhinos back to Chad, where they were wiped out three decades ago…

African Parks isn’t the first organization to translocate wildlife, a practice that is decades old and brought gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park from Canada in the 1990s, and reintroduced the giant pandas to China in 2011. Other groups have moved animals across the continent, but the organization is the first to do it on such a large scale — while managing parks in some of the most violence-plagued countries in Africa’. SOURCE…

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