The images are stark and grisly at the start of the short but bluntly powerful documentary “Gardeners of Eden”: Television news footage presents the bloody carcasses of elephants, shorn of their tusks, that are sold in the illegal ivory trade. And soon we are taken to Tsavo National Park in Kenya, the front line of the elephant slaughter in Africa, which is losing its population of these majestic mammals at an alarming rate. The film follows the efforts of Daphne Sheldrick, 80, of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which raises orphaned elephant calves and reintroduces them into the wild. And it accompanies members of the trust and armed Kenya Wildlife Service officers as they search for poachers and treat elephants wounded by wires planted to cripple herds.

At one point the film interviews a local poacher who bemoans his lack of employment, underscoring the link between poverty and poaching in Africa. He explains how his reward is dwarfed by the profits of the smugglers in China (and, presumably, the United States) who resell his ivory. Weeks after the interview, he is arrested again.

And why are these noble creatures being killed wholesale? For trinkets — mantelpiece knickknacks. The sheer needlessness is appalling.

We probably don’t need to see the actress Kristin Davis (“Sex and the City”), a patron of the Sheldrick trust and an executive producer of this film, on camera as much as we do, certainly not as much as we need to know the extent of this scourge throughout Africa and the steps being taken in America and Europe to stem the slaughter. But Ms. Davis does promote the trust and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and sounds the alert. And that is very much to her credit.