African forest elephants face catastrophic poaching pressure for ivory, with welfare implications both for poached individuals and for the traumatized survivors in disrupted herds.
Forest elephant poaching has welfare dimensions that extend far beyond the immediate deaths of poached individuals. Elephants are long-lived, highly intelligent, socially complex animals with deep individual relationships and the capacity to experience grief. The death of a matriarch who carried decades of knowledge about water sources, seasonal routes, and threats removes an irreplaceable social resource from her family group. Surviving elephants in heavily poached areas show trauma responses - hypervigilance, altered ranging to avoid human-associated areas, and disrupted social behavior. The elephant family groups that survive heavy poaching periods are traumatized communities whose welfare is comprehensively disrupted by the violence done to their social structure.