Across Africa a war against the continent's largest animal has reduced the elephant population to dire levels.

The epic slaughter has led to warnings that if poaching continues at its current rate, elephants could be wiped out across Africa within the next 10 to 15 years.

Tens of thousands of elephants are being slaughtered each year, a rate higher than any time in the previous two decades.

American conservationist Cynthia Moss has spent the past 30 years studying elephants at Amboseli National Park in Kenya.

"We are going to lose the largest animal on earth just so people can have trinkets," she said.

Driving the demand for ivory is China's wealthy, whose insatiable appetite has pushed the price of elephant's tusks to record highs.

Dr Moss is considered a world expert on elephant behaviour.

She has put her research on hold as she now fears that the current rate of poaching threatens the elephant's survival as a species.

"It's commonly considered 10 per cent of what is actually going through is what you get in the ports or airports. And just using those tonnage that brings you up to even more than 28 or 38 or 40,000 elephants," she said.

"Ten to fifteen years and we are going to lose them all.

"If it continues this way we can't save them."

Across Africa, the continent's ivory wars are becoming increasingly militarised.

'Outnumbered and outgunned'

Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo is a haven not just for wildlife, but for insurgents fighting some of the continent's longest running wars.

Poachers have guns - lots of them - and lightly equipped rangers say they cannot compete.

Paul Onyango, a chief ranger at Garamba National Park, believes the only answer is to give the park's protectors greater firepower.

"The insurgents have got better arms, the insurgents are better organised and this makes us have a problem and in reality we are both outnumbered and also outgunned. This is a problem," he said.

He says more weapons are needed, particularly if they are to stand a chance against armed groups like Joseph Kony's Lords Resistance army, the LRA, who have made the park their base.

"Unfortunately ivory prices have really gone high, they are as good as gold now," Mr Onyango said.

"Mostly for the LRA, the Kony group, I think they have lost their previous source of income, so now they have diverted to killing the elephants and taking them to Sudan and of course we have got some information that they go to Darfur where they sell this ivory and they purchase arms, ammunition and supplies.

"So it is their source of survival."

'Big money'

But it is not just outlaws who are cashing in.

The Ugandan military was implicated in a recent mass kill in which 22 elephants were shot from the air.

The complexity of the challenge in Garamba and the vastness of the park is made clear after such killings.

A pristine pocket of wilderness inside a failed state, Garamba was initially set up to protect the last population of northern white rhino.

They have all gone now.

Park manager Luis Arranz is fearful that at the current rate of poaching, the elephant may be next.

There are now only an estimated 2,500 elephants remaining, from a herd once as large as 20,000.

"For us the year is starting maybe in November til November, so between November and now and next month I think we have lost about 350 or 400 elephants," he said.

He says if that rate continues, like the rhino, the elephants will disappear.

Last year a record amount of ivory was seized worldwide. It equalled the tusks of more than 4,000 dead elephants.

But it is estimated that amount represents only 10 per cent of the total amount of elephants slaughtered.

Mr Onyango is an angry man, up against seemingly insurmountable odds.

"Most of the tuskers like this one will have been poached or died of natural death or whatever," he said.

"So they are very, very few. So when we lose such elephants we lose a lot because eventually we will not have such elephants remaining at all."

On the ground across Africa, efforts to stop the slaughter are continuing but that is not where this battle is likely to be won, if it has any chance at all.

"Right now the demand for ivory is there, they are willing to pay big money for it so you can't stop it here," Dr Moss said.

"We can't stop it on the ground it is too big, we don't have enough resources.

"You would have to have a huge army and it still might not work and you have to stop the demand, you have to raise the consciousness of people in the far east to tell them, 'do not buy ivory, it kills elephants'."