I was the seatmate to a safari hunt owner last year on a crosscountry flight. He confirmed what I had heard about elephants. In countries that have controlled licensed hunts, the elephant population is stable.
The safari guides assist the police and rangers in controlling poaching. To do otherwise would cost them money.
Last year, the US Government destroyed a huge pile of ivory worth over $20,000,000 that had been confiscated.
Complete waste. Now, had they held an auction and sold the goods, the $20,000,000 would have gone a long way toward curbing poaching and enforcing laws.
But no, the photo op of a steam roller crushing ivory is far more important.
And made the 'living ivory' all the more valuable, making poaching well worth the risk.
Just for info, the savannah and forest elephants aren’t the ‘normal’ elephants hunted by sportsmen in Africa. Almost all the big safari companies have their own assistance programs to locate and eliminate poachers in their assigned areas, and they are quite diligent about it. The African Elephant is in no danger of being in short supply except in countries such as Kenya that don’t allow sport hunting. Think of it this way, if you were a midwest corn farmer, would it be to your advantage to have 15-20 elephants in your cropland? Would you feel different if you could guide hunters after them for $30-40000 apiece? Hunting elephants, lions, etc equals survival. I get a newsletter from Buzz Charlton, and they document their anti poaching activities, plus the fact that one pride of lions have killed several kids in the vicinity, these things still happen, so without hunting, elephants, lions, etc are a nuisance and are treated accordingly.