Jakarta Globe, November 12, 2012
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Three
elephants were found dead on a plantation in the Riau district of Pelalawan on
Monday, allegedly killed as a result of having been poisoned.
The remains
were already decaying when discovered not far from Kilometer 89 of Jalan
Koridor Baserah, with the rare animals’ deaths judged to have taken place a
week earlier.
“Seeing the
condition of the carcasses, we think that the three elephants died of
poisoning,” a spokesman for the Riau office of the World Wildlife Fund,
Syamsidar, told the Indonesian news portal liputan6.com on Monday.
Two of the
elephants were adults, while the other was a calf.
Their
deaths add to a list of more than 10 Sumatran elephants found dead in Riau
province's Tesso Nilo National Park and surrounding areas over the past year,
coinciding with an increasing number of conflicts between elephants and humans
due to the opening of forests for oil palm plantations in Sumatra.
The WWF has
called the situation alarming, as presently only an estimated 200 Sumatran
elephants are believed to live in the wild in Tesso Nila and its surrounding
environs.
Sumatran
elephants have been classified as critically endangered by the International
Union for Conservation of Nature since January 2011, as the population has
declined by at least 80 percent over the past 75 years.
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