African elephant poaching is down, but not nearly enough

A new report by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species says that 60 percent of elephants found dead last year in the wild were poached. In 2011, 80 percent of dead elephants had been killed for their ivory tusks. While these numbers are a step in the right direction, poaching rates are still far too high to allow the species to recover. Only 500,000 of the pachyderms remain in Africa, down from 1.2 million in the 1970s. Reuters