Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Satao, a bull elephant who lived in the arid plains northwest of Mombasa, had tusks so long that when he walked they nearly scraped the ground. Mark Deeble, a filmmaker who spent weeks curled up in a box by a watering hole, waiting to catch a glimpse of Satao, described him as materializing out of the haze, as in “Lawrence of Arabia”—“a magnificent, dusty behemoth.” Satao was born sometime in the late nineteen-sixties, and by the time he reached forty he was one of the largest elephants in Africa. Just the weight of his ivory topped two hundred pounds; all told, he weighed probably more than seven tons. By the logic of the savanna, Satao’s size should have made him immune from predators, but by the logic of the market it made him that much more vulnerable.

In February, Satao was wounded by poisoned arrows. (Poachers have increasingly turned to arrows because gunshots betray their location.) A vet who examined him through a pair of binoculars concluded that trying to treat the elephant would be more dangerous than leaving him alone. Satao recovered, only to be hit again, in May. This time, the arrow pierced his left flank, and he died. Poachers cut off his tusks, leaving his face so mutilated that it took Kenyan authorities ten days to confirm his identity. In June, Deeble, who wrote in his blog about Satao, went to see the body, which he found splayed on the red earth, white with vulture droppings.

Satao was an exceptional elephant; his story is not. Africa, after years of progress in protecting its wildlife, is again in crisis mode. In 2011 alone, an estimated twenty-five thousand African elephants were killed for their ivory; this comes to almost seventy a day, or nearly three an hour. Since then, an additional forty-five thousand African elephants—about ten per cent of the total population—have been slaughtered. Long thought to be one species, African elephants probably belong to two. Forest elephants, which are slightly smaller than bush elephants, live only in West and Central Africa. Their numbers have plunged by more than sixty per cent just since 2002, and if this trend continues they could be gone entirely within a decade.

The plight of elephants is paralleled by an equally gruesome situation for rhinos. Three of the world’s five rhinoceros species are listed as “critically endangered”; one of them, the Javan rhino, is probably down to fewer than fifty individuals. The most numerous rhino, the white rhino, survives primarily in South Africa. Until recently, it was considered a conservation success story; however, poaching has increased to the point that the white rhino, too, is at risk. In the first few months of this year, nearly four hundred rhinos were killed in South Africa for their horns, most of them in national parks. Although rhinos can live without their horns, which are made of keratin, like your fingernails, poachers generally leave them so mangled that they die. In May, a baby rhino from South Africa’s Kapama Private Game Reserve made international news when it was found mourning over its mother’s bloody body.

Driving the slaughter is desire. Ivory, most of which ends up in China, can fetch fifteen hundred dollars a pound on the black market. Rhino horn is sold in Asia for medicinal properties (of which it has none). It has also become a status symbol in Vietnam, where it’s ground up and served in a tea or snorted as a party “drug.” Dearer even than cocaine, it commands upward of twenty-five thousand dollars a pound. The high price of horn and ivory has attracted organized crime and, more deadly still, armed militias. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, has reportedly profited from elephant poaching, and so, too, has al-Shabaab, the group behind last year’s shopping-mall attack in Nairobi. According to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, there is “growing evidence that the terrorist groups stalking Africa” are funding their activities “to a great extent from ivory trafficking.”

All this news recently prompted the White House to announce a near total ban on the sale of ivory in the U.S. The proposed rules have prompted grumbling, including, predictably enough, from the N.R.A., which is worried about the resale value of guns with ivory components. But such rules are a critical step. The White House has also pledged ten million dollars to train police and park rangers in Africa, a pledge that was matched by the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang. The British have committed an additional seventeen million dollars to anti-poaching efforts, and, in January, Congress, in a rare show of caring, appropriated forty-five million dollars to be used by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development to combat poaching and trafficking. A couple of weeks ago, lawmakers in Albany also voted to ban nearly all sales in New York of items containing ivory and rhino horn, a move that should make wildlife crime easier to prosecute at a state level.

But, as Satao’s slaying indicates, these pledges haven’t yet translated into change on the ground. Right around the time Kenyan authorities announced Satao’s death, the director of the Garamba National Park, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reported that sixty-eight elephants had been killed there in the previous two months. “The park is under attack from all fronts,” the director, Jean-Marc Froment, said. Photographs show elephants with their faces hacked off and their rotted brains emerging from the wounds.

Meanwhile, as disturbing as the recent carnage is, the long-term view is, if anything, worse. Elephants and rhinos are among the last survivors of a once rich bestiary of giants. Australia was home to thirteen-foot-long marsupials. North America had mammoths and mastodons, South America glyptodonts and enormous sloths, Madagascar massive elephant birds and giant lemurs. Before people arrived on the scene, these megafauna were protected by their size; afterward their size became a liability. The giant beasts couldn’t reproduce fast enough to make up for the losses to human hunting, and so, one after another, they vanished. In this sense, what’s happening today in Africa is just the final act of a long-running tragedy.

Mike Chase, an American conservation biologist, is currently conducting an aerial census of Africa’s elephants. He started work on the project in February, when, he told the Huffington Post, he hoped to “leave people inspired and motivated with some good news.” But the opposite has happened. At a reserve in Ethiopia, where his team had expected to find three hundred elephants, they counted just thirty-six. Now, Chase said, “I feel as though the only good I’m doing is recording the extinction of one of the most magnificent animals that ever walked the earth.” ♦