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Our fight to save the elephant from extinction has reach a tipping point. On Tuesday a new report warned that nearly 35,000 elephants have been killed by poachers in Africa every year since 2010.

That means more of these remarkable, majestic animals are being killed each year than are being born. In as little as 100 years the world’s largest land animal could disappear from the savannahs and forests of Africa for good.

And why?

So we can hack off their tusks to make jewellery, ornaments and mobile phone covers. It is vulgar, it is immoral and it is utterly obscene.

Two months ago the biggest “tusker” in Africa, an elephant named Satao, was killed in Kenya despite all the attempts to protect him. His huge tusks, 100lbs of ivory, had been hacked from his face.

Satao knew the danger he was in. Wildlife photographers saw him moving from bush to bush, keeping his tusks hidden. That shows how intelligent and sensitive these animals are.

They see the bodies of their loved ones with their tusks sawn off and they mourn their dead. The way elephants caress the bones of their loved ones is one of the most affecting sights in nature.

This is a species that understands people are after them and they are living in fear.

Worse still, the number of elephants being massacred every year does not tell the full story.

The killers target the elder elephants because they have the biggest tusks, so they are taking out the matriarchs, the aunties and the great bulls, disrupting all the complex social patterns of these herds.

That makes it less likely that the survivors will breed successfully and replace those elephants that are killed.

You are leaving the herds in the hands of young, inexperienced elephants who don’t have the wisdom to pass on.

They don’t know the migration routes or where the watering holes are.

And it’s not just the elephants who are suffering. It is people too. Many African communities rely on tourism, and that depends on the elephants.

Nobody wants to go to Kenya and Tanzania to see the mutilated carcasses and smell the stench of their rotting bodies.

The poachers, working for the Chinese Triads, are funding the death and destruction caused by terrorist groups like Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram.

What makes this sickening slaughter even more tragic is that it could be brought to an end so easily. The biggest market for ivory is in China and Thailand, where it can still be bought legally.

There is an ever-growing middle class there that sees ivory as the ultimate status symbol and the demand is accelerating.

All it would take is for the Chinese premier to sign a bit of paper saying we are going to close the ivory carving factories and that demand would disappear. If he told people ivory was no longer morally acceptable, Thailand and Vietnam would soon follow suit.

Then the market would die, the killing would end and elephants would survive.

(Image: Getty)

But in animal welfare issues, China remains disconnected from what is happening in the rest of the world. They still farm bears for their bile and breed tigers for their body parts.

There are more tigers in Chinese tiger farms than there are in the wild – 10,000 in captivity and only 3,000 in the wild.

Nobody ever thought we would get to the same situation with elephants, where there are so few left. But now that day is approaching fast and the world has to wake up.

Oscar Wilde said a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I think that sums up the way we are driving elephants towards extinction.

Ivory only belongs in one place and that is not on mobile phones, around people’s necks or on their mantelpieces. It is on an elephant.

The time for mere words is over. We need action. Unless this madness ends soon, children’s picture books will tell the grim story – E was for elephant.