Causes of Endangerment
The Borneo Pygmy Elephant is a fascinating creature, one that is as extremely incredible as it is critically endangered. The Borneo Pygmy Elephant species and other Asian elephant's endangerment is mainly due to the threats of habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation of their habitats. These creatures live in rainforests with many trees that are chopped down because of growing populations, making deforestation one of the major aspects of their near extinction status. With this burdening down on them, the elephants have a much harder time finding migration routes and they lose most of their food sources. This huge threat in whole, leaves Borneo Pygmy Elephants with practically nothing, and it can really only lead to a very struggling life and eventually death. In addition to habitat destruction, humans and elephants are increasingly running into conflict because of such things like when elephants eat people's crops since they do not have food of their own to eat. This makes the humans, whose crops are being devoured by unwanted elephants, extremely angry and they decide to put an end to the elephants. But sadly, even worse scenarios occur, like when a fight breaks out among the two beings and both of them end up dead, leading to hundreds of both human and elephant deaths per year. Overall, each and every terrible cause of the Borneo Pygmy Elephant's endangerment revolves around one thing, the fact that the animals do not have the resources that they need, and that is because they are taken away.
Loss of Species
Losing the Borneo Pygmy Elephant to extinction would be a terrible thing because the species has an incredibly unique set of genetics as well as tons of more research to be done about it. By saving their species and keeping the elephants around, the genetic diversity of Borneo's forests would remain and there would still be many different types of interesting animals there to observe and explore. Imagine a game without any action, a story without any problems, well, that would basically be the effect of no more Borneo Pygmy Elephants. The food web would also be affected by the loss of the Borneo Pygmy Elephant for many reasons. The plants that the elephants feed on might not get eaten by the other species as much and then start to overpower the food web entirely. And if the elephant's predators were to also run out of food, they would not have enough resources to keep their own species alive and the the entire food web system would be put out of whack because they are the top predators. Besides all of those reasons, there is also so much more to learn about the Borneo Pygmy Elephant species. There is practically little to no scientific research and knowledge about them so there truly is so much more to learn and discover. In all, we need to try and protect the entire Borneo Pygmy Elephant species because an animal that is already so interesting, yet still has more things to be found out about it, definitely deserves to be kept.
Conservation Efforts
The World Wildlife Foundation is currently trying to help Borneo Pygmy Elephants in ways that could quite possibly be very helpful. They started working on this project in 2005 by at first just simply attaching satellite collars to five elephants of different herds in the Malaysian state Sabah. This kind of work is part of the first scientific research for this seemingly unknown species, but the tracking data has shown insight into the elephant's routes. Because of the study, WWF has has been able to recommend ways to help the elephant's habitats and maintain critical areas of the forests. They have communicated with plantation managers and land owners of important habitat spots of the elephants to try and reforest those areas to allow Borneo Pygmy Elephants easy access to their natural habitat as well as managing timber projects. The World Wildlife Foundation also has a program through their website where people are able to donate money in order to adopt an elephant. This is another great way for normal people to get involved to save this important species and there are different amount options so you don't have to throw away your entire life savings just to help. Overall, the World Wildlife Foundation is putting in incredible amounts of effort in many ways to help the Borneo Pygmy Elephant species not become extinct and bring them out of endangerment.
Conservation Progress
Although there has not been a clear increase in the Borneo Pygmy Elephant population based on the conservation efforts in place, there is more and more research being done which seems to be putting their species back on track. With increasing communication, officials are trying to convince people in Borneo to also help conserve the elephants through improving their habitats and cutting down the amount of deforestation. These efforts to help save Borneo Pygmy Elephants have overall seemed very promising and should continue because they truly could end up changing the species' situation completely.
