Warning: some images in this report may be distressing to some readers.
"I felt as if someone had punched me hard in the stomach. I couldn't look at the picture. For the first time in my life I felt helpless," said Christy Williams, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Myanmar.
She was describing a photograph of a dead elephant whose skin had been completely stripped away.
"The skin has been removed from the animal's whole body. All you can see is rotting pink flesh," Christy Williams said.
She says she has seen a great deal in 20 years of working on elephant conservation, but what she saw in that photograph was horrifying on a completely different scale.
A new threat
Among the greatest threats to elephants worldwide are the destruction of their habitat and poaching for their long white tusks.
These two factors are mainly blamed for the fall in elephant numbers.
But lately a new danger has emerged: the hunting of Asian elephants for their skin.
Source: BBC Bangla. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.
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