The population of African elephants has dropped from approximately 1 million in 1980 to approximately 415 thousand today. Public outrage over the United States Fish and Wildlife Service’s now postponed plan to end the ban on the importation of elephant trophies from Zimbabwe therefore seems appropriate. Are we all missing something? Do we not need to worry about the population of African elephants in Zimbabwe anymore?

Answering this question is difficult because elephant population counts are notoriously unreliable and inconsistent. A more detailed plot of elephant population over time contains too much error to be useful, so I settled for the above comparison of percent change in elephant population from the early 2000’s to the mid 2010’s sorted by country. In the map above, green indicates countries with elephant population growth and red indicates countries with population decline. South Africa and Uganda have been the most successful at rebuilding their elephant populations with 88% and 120% growth respectively over the observed period. Chad, Tanzania, and Mozambique have fared the worst with 90%, 62%, and 59% decline respectively.

Zimbabwe comes in towards the middle with a 10% decrease in elephant population since the early 2000s. Clearly, Zimbabwe is not the worst place to be an elephant, but a 10% decline is hardly evidence that a ban on elephant trophy exports is no longer necessary.