In the space of a single century, Africa’s elephants fell from millions to a few hundred thousand — and the sharpest losses came from a poaching crisis that peaked in the early 2010s. This is the story of elephant poaching in numbers: how many are killed, how the ivory trade works, how bad the crisis got, and where things stand today.
The short answer: at the height of the crisis around 2010–2012, an estimated 100,000 elephants were killed for ivory in just three years (Wittemyer et al., PNAS 2014). Poaching has fallen significantly since that 2011 peak, but it hasn’t stopped — and forest elephants remain in freefall, now listed as Critically Endangered.