Poaching for ivory causes catastrophic suffering to individual elephants and destroys the complex social structures essential to elephant wellbeing and survival.
Poaching causes suffering on multiple levels simultaneously. The physical process of killing elephants is often prolonged - large body mass means that even rifle shots may not cause rapid death. The death of family members causes measurable grief responses in surviving elephants, who return to bones and remain at death sites. Orphaned calves face dramatically reduced survival rates and show behavioral abnormalities consistent with severe trauma. Family groups that lose their matriarch lose irreplaceable ecological knowledge, leading to poor decisions, increased stress, and higher mortality in subsequent years. The welfare cost of poaching extends across generations.