Tanzania turns a blind eye to poaching as elephant populations tumble

As illegal poaching escalates in national parks from Selous to Ruaha, officials attempt to silence the crisis and many fear Serengeti herds will be next

For tour guides in Tanzania, the results of a continental elephant census showing that the country had lost two-thirds of its herd in five years and become Africa's ivory trading hub came as no surprise.

They'd tried to prevent tourists from seeing the melting skins and drying bones littering the Selous ecosystem in southern Tanzania for years. But they couldn't mask the shots heard from safari camps in a reserve once known as "the elephant capital of the world". Last year it was named in the journal Science as Africa's poaching hotspot, and a Unesco world heritage in danger site.

"When you hear the gunshots next to the camp, you know that they're [elephants] being finished," said one safari guide in Tanzania's commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

As people cried foul over Cecil, a 13-year-old lion shot to fame by a holidaying Minnesotan dentist in Zimbabwe, the slaughter of five elephants by Tanzanian poachers in Kenya's Tsavo park passed almost silently.

In Tanzania, it is not hunters who can freely take home trophy elephants, but illegal poachers, who have decimated herds in the Selous. Leaving behind mainly baby elephants waiting for tusks, they've followed disappointed safari-goers to Ruaha, Tanzania's second greatest pachyderm-heavy area.

"At every camp in Ruaha we've either heard shots, seen poachers or elephant carcasses," with the latter even spotted at the park gates that ivory flows out of on the back of motorbikes, in ambulances and on public buses, said the guide.

Sirili Akko, executive secretary of Tanzania's Association of Tour Operators said: "We have to create international pressure on the countries which are defined to be the market for the ivory and other wildlife products, as now, the lions are going the same way."