No elephant, no us?
The survival of the elephant is critical for the human race, according to Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson, authors of Walking thunder. They cited the ongoing destruction of the elephant population, when more than 70,000 were being slaughtered a year at the height of the killings in the 1980s, and said that without them, we and other species could be obliterated.
The African forest elephant fertilises the Congo rainforest, the second largest (after the Amazon) on earth. There is also an ‘interspecies communication’, where the fortunes of the elephant are connected to those of humans, the authors stated.