The west has preferred to focus on endangered animals, rather than endangered humans. African elephants are hunted down and stripped of tusks and hidden by poachers. Their numbers in Africa slumped from 1.2m to 600,000 in a decade until CITES - the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species - banned the trade in ivory.
Does this next sentence follow, given the preceding text?
The African elephant population was decimated by poachers.
yes