African and Asian elephant populations face poaching pressure for ivory and human-wildlife conflict that cause direct welfare harm and population decline.
Elephant conservation involves acute welfare harm at both individual and population levels. Poaching for ivory involves the violent death of individual elephants, frequently orphaning dependent calves who face death or traumatic capture. Human-elephant conflict — as elephants range into agricultural areas — results in elephants being killed, injured, or captured as well as human casualties. Conservation approaches that address root causes — providing economic benefits to communities living alongside elephants, improving crops for human-elephant coexistence, and reducing ivory demand in consumer markets — achieve better outcomes than enforcement alone.