ON November 23, 2019, a quiet tragedy unfolded in the Tabin Wildlife Reserve that should have touched the heart of every Malaysian. A beautiful, twenty-five-year-old Sumatran rhinoceros named Iman drew her final, painful breath after a long battle with cancer. Iman was no ordinary rhino; she was the very last of her kind in Malaysia.
When her heart stopped beating, an entire lineage that had roamed our rainforests for millennia vanished from our nation forever.
We wept. We wrote eulogies. We promised ourselves: Never again.
Yet recent headlines remind us that our memory may be shorter than we think. A searing exposé by the New York Times, front-page reports in the
Daily Express, and a stark warning from WWF Malaysia have brought to light a deeply troubling reality: our beloved Bornean pygmy elephants are in serious danger.
With an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 of these gentle giants left in our forests – a number where, as conservationists have warned, every single loss is significant – we are all living in the shadow of another permanent goodbye, unless we come together to prevent it.
The Ghost in the Shadows
When Iman died, she left behind empty breeding pens and a haunting lesson about what happens when a crisis creeps up on us quietly. Today, the pygmy elephant faces the same cold arithmetic of decline.
Reports detail a horrifying surge in bloodshed: at least twenty-three elephants ruthlessly slaughtered for their ivory since July 2024, five of them found completely beheaded. This is no longer the work of lone opportunists.
WWF Malaysia’s Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer, Sophia Lim, has described the evidence as pointing clearly toward organised crime, requiring not just stronger enforcement but faster coordination across agencies, greater intelligence-sharing, and—crucially—full public support to close the gaps that poachers exploit.
Consider the male elephant found on May 17 in the Sungai Pinangah Forest Reserve in Tongod. After estate workers reported hearing a loud blast, rangers discovered a massive creature slumped in the dirt, his head hacked away in an L-shape to extract his tusks.
Days later, another elephant was discovered in Kalabakan with a severely injured, partially severed trunk—a reminder that the cruelty is not confined to a single district but is spreading across Sabah’s forests.
As wildlife activist Shavez Cheema of 1StopBorneo Wildlife told the Daily Express, the Tongod killing struck him personally—it happened near one of his NGO’s project sites. “Can you imagine the pain it went through while being chainsawed?” he asked. “That is just absolutely disgusting.”
The Funeral We Refused to See
While we humans may reduce these creatures to population statistics or news headlines, the elephants themselves experience this violence with a devastating depth of feeling. Among the most heartbreaking accounts shared by wildlife rangers occurred near the Maliau Basin Conservation Area.
After a young, headless male elephant was shot and mutilated, a herd of twenty elephants emerged from the thick brush. They did not run.
Instead, they formed a silent, solemn circle around their fallen companion. In an unmistakable act of mourning, the herd used their trunks to gently nudge and roll his heavy, lifeless body across the dirt, leaving him to rest under the shade of a tree before quietly retreating into the forest.
These are not mindless animals. As Sophia Lim reminded us, elephants are a keystone species and ecosystem engineers; they play a vital role in seed dispersal, forest regeneration, and biodiversity maintenance.
“If we lose them,” she warned, “we lose the ecological balance and resilience of our forests and the future they support.” They are, in other words, creatures whose existence holds our rainforests together. They feel love, they feel loss, and they grieve for their dead. When a syndicate kills a dominant bull or a matriarch, it does not merely reduce a number on a chart; it tears apart the emotional fabric of an entire elephant family—and weakens the living forest around them.
A Numbers Game We Are Losing
The scale of the crisis becomes painfully clear when set against the biology of the species itself. Speaking to the New Straits Times in June 2026, State Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Datuk Jafry Ariffin disclosed that between 2022 and 2025, annual elephant deaths in Sabah ranged from twenty-five to forty-two—lost to poaching, snaring, habitat-related incidents, human-elephant conflict, and natural mortality.
In some cases, carcasses are discovered at such an advanced stage of decomposition that the exact cause of death cannot be determined at all.
Set those numbers against a simple biological fact: elephants are among the slowest-breeding mammals on earth. A cow carries her calf for nearly twenty-two months, and the interval between births can stretch to four or five years.
As the Minister cautioned, it cannot be assumed that the birth rate fully compensates for the number of elephants lost each year. We may, in other words, already be losing more than we are replacing—and if that is the case, the population is not merely declining; it is quietly unravelling.
“Reducing preventable deaths,” Datuk Jafry said, “is critical to ensuring the long-term viability and recovery of Sabah’s elephant population.” Those are not the words of an alarmist. They are the words of a minister looking at the arithmetic and telling us, plainly, that the margin for error has all but disappeared.
A Vast Forest, and a Difficult Fight
It is easy, from the safety of our towns and cities, to ask why the killers have not been caught. But the reality on the ground is far more humbling than that.
Jafry has been candid about the challenges facing investigators. The Tongod killing happened deep in the jungle, far from witnesses, in terrain where the chances of anyone having seen or heard anything useful were slim.
The elephant’s head and tusks were buried at a distance from the carcass, forcing investigators to rely on indirect means—forensics, intelligence, and painstaking fieldwork—rather than eyewitness accounts. As of late May 2026, there are no fresh leads.
Sharon Koh, Head of the Wildlife Protection Unit at WWF Malaysia, put it plainly: Sabah’s forests are vast and complex, making it impossible to monitor every area at all times, even with enforcement agencies doing their best under challenging conditions.
The Sabah Wildlife Department, led by Director Mohd Soffian, is working closely with the police and other agencies, but the department’s own officers are the first to acknowledge that they are stretched thin across an enormous landscape.
None of this is an excuse. But it is a reality—and it is precisely why this fight cannot be left to the authorities alone. The people who live closest to these forests—estate workers, plantation staff, villagers, lorry drivers—are the eyes and ears that our rangers desperately need.
The Work Already Under Way
It would be unfair—and inaccurate—to suggest that nothing is being done. Sabah’s conservation infrastructure is more serious than many Sabahans realise, and it is worth knowing what is already in motion.
The Sabah Wildlife Department now deploys smart patrolling applications that help rangers and enforcement teams carry out targeted patrols, identify high-risk hotspots where snare traps are likely to be found, and analyse trends and patterns of illegal activity within protected areas.
At the district level, dedicated task forces have been established in plantation areas to implement integrated mitigation measures—including fencing, the development of food banks to reduce crop-raiding, and the creation of wildlife corridors that allow elephants to move safely between fragments of forest.
The long-term conservation strategy, as Jafry emphasised, is rooted in in-situ conservation: maintaining and securing the elephants’ natural habitat rather than relocating populations into captivity. Continuous efforts are under way to strengthen habitat connectivity and reduce conflict through landscape-level planning.
The Sabah Wildlife Department also possesses a world-class forensic laboratory recognised by CITES, and facilities such as the Lok Kawi Wildlife Park and the Bornean Elephant Sanctuary serve as vital centres for the care, rehabilitation, and temporary housing of rescued elephants.
These are real, meaningful measures. But as the Minister himself acknowledged, the poaching crisis is outpacing the resources available to contain it—and that is where the rest of us come in.
This Is Our Backyard
Shavez put it simply: “This is your backyard, this is your home. If you do not protect it, who will?”
His words cut to the heart of the matter. For too long, many of us have treated wildlife crime as someone else’s problem—something that happens in distant African savannahs, not in the forests behind our kampungs and plantations.
But Sabah is home to one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth, and these elephants are ours. Their survival is not an abstract conservation target; it is part of who we are as Sabahans and as Malaysians.
Shavez warned that Sabah could eventually lose part of its identity if its iconic wildlife continues to disappear. “We have already lost the Sumatran rhino,” he said.
“If we lose all these animals, Sabah will lose its value.” He is right. Endangered species such as dugongs, banteng, and clouded leopards also need our attention before it is too late.
What Each of Us Can Do
Shavez has called for the bounty on poachers to be raised from RM10,000 to between RM50,000 and RM100,000—enough to make informants come forward and to send a clear signal that wildlife crime carries serious consequences. He has pledged RM5,000 of his own money toward the cause and is urging NGOs, companies, and the public to collectively raise the amount. “We just need to catch one person and it will set the tone,” he said.
Sophia echoed the call for collective responsibility: “This is a moment for all of us, including the government, civil society and the public, to act decisively.” WWF Malaysia has urged a coordinated and collective effort—through the combined will of government, communities, civil society, and the public—to protect the remaining elephants.
But beyond bounties and policy, the fight needs all of us in the simplest, most human ways. If you live near plantation borders or forest reserves, stay alert and report anything suspicious. If you see wildlife products being sold or traded online, report them. If you are a business operating in or near elephant corridors, consider what resources—funding, manpower, technology—you can contribute to community ranger programmes. And if you are a parent or a teacher, talk to the young people in your life about why these animals matter, before they grow up in a Sabah that has lost them.
Social media has already begun to play a role. As Shavez noted, graphic images of wildlife cruelty that once disappeared from public attention are now being widely shared, forcing Sabahans to confront what is happening in their own forests. That awareness is painful, but it is necessary. We cannot afford to become emotionally detached from the destruction unfolding in our own backyard.
A Choice of Legacy
We cannot let the pygmy elephant become a ghost story we tell our grandchildren, just as we now do with the Bornean rhino. Iman’s empty enclosure stands as a monument to what we lost. The mourning herd in Maliau Basin is a living plea for what we can still save.
The investigators in Tongod are doing their best in difficult terrain with limited leads. The rangers are patrolling forests larger than some countries. The activists are spending their own money and raising their own voices. The question is whether the rest of us will join them—or leave them to fight alone.
The world is watching, but more importantly, our children are watching. Will we be the generation that looked away while the final curtain fell on Sabah’s gentle giants?
Or will we be the generation that stood up—together, as Sabahans and as Malaysians—and said: not on our watch?
Iman is gone. The mourning herd is still here. The choice is ours.
Alex is a senior legal practitioner
The views expressed here are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of the Daily Express. If you have something to share, write to us at: Forum@dailyexpress.com.my
