Saving Kenya's Elephants With Drones

In the hills above the Maasai village of Aitong in Kenya, Marc Goss is watching an elephant funeral. He squints a few dozen yards through the bush at 10 grieving pachyderms surrounding the carcass of a fallen comrade speared in its back, its face unrecognizable after its trunk was hacked off and its ivory tusks removed. It’s the third elephant Goss has found slaughtered in four days. “It’s pretty grim,” he says. “It’ll be eaten by hyenas now.”

Kenyan conservationists like Goss are facing what the United Nations Environment Programme calls the most serious poaching threat in a quarter century. Demand for illicit ivory in developing economies, including China and Thailand, has doubled since 2007, and elephant ivory sells for as much as $455 a pound in Hong Kong, according to UNEP. At least 232 of the almost 40,000 elephants in Kenya were killed during the first nine months of the year, and 384 were killed in 2012.