Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) is astounded at the death of yet another wild elephant in Gerik, Perak. The incident occurred on January 3rd when a 40-year-old female elephant was electrocuted by a live wire on a roadwork construction site. Herds of wild elephants come into populated areas while foraging for…

Bornean pygmy elephants are facing existential threats in Sabah and so the death of any more wild elephants in the state is bad news. Yet just over the past few months several wild elephants have been shot dead by poachers or irate plantation workers. Now another wild elephant is dead….

People cut down forests and plant crops in areas where thick woods once grew. Wild elephants, feeling increasingly hemmed in by human settlements, often have no choice but to venture into populated areas. Once there, however, they risk coming into conflict with local farmers who may not look kindly on…

Every now and then reports of orphaned Bornean pygmy elephants being rescued by the Sabah Wildlife Department surface. These baby elephants have become lost while their mothers are nowhere to be seen. In the past seven years 22 baby elephants have been rescued this way. Many of them cannot survive,…

Scores of factories may be operating illegally on the island of Penang. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is that some of those factories may have been causing considerable harm to the environment. A case in point is a carbon filter-processing factory in Kampung Sungai Lembu, where it has reportedly been operating…

There they stood shoulder to shoulder, several dozens of them, dressed in rubber shark costumes with the dorsal fins cut off. The activists who gathered outside a high-end restaurant in Hong Kong Harbor bore placards and shouted “stop selling!” They meant shark fin soup, which remains a popular dish in…

The RM1.2 billion Aman Laut project, dubbed the “Dubai of Malaysia,” is planned to be a spanking new self-contained hub of skyscrapers clustered in ideal seafront settings with high-end residences, condominiums, malls and restaurants in Alor Setar in Kedah. But now it is not to be, at least for the…

The Ulu Muda forest reserve is a 160,000-hectare hotspot of biodiversity in Kedah and one of the largest swathes of lowland dipterocarp forest in Peninsular Malaysia. Its wildlife boasts well over a hundred species of mammals, including Asian elephants, Malayan tigers, Malayan tapirs, Malayan sun bears, gaur and flying squirrels….

Last summer a wild Bornean pygmy elephant in Sabah came to global fame for its crooked tusks, which made him resemble a pachyderm version of a saber-toothed cat and duly earned him the nickname ‘Sabre.’ A few months later he was dead, having been killed by poachers for those very tusks….

They’re a persistent lot, are they not? Wildlife traffickers, that is. Malaysian authorities have been stepping up their efforts to clamp down on international smuggling networks that use the country as a regional transit point for the trafficking of ivory from Africa. That, though, has clearly not deterred ivory-smuggling syndicates. And so 2017 has started pretty…

Environmentalists on Penang have been right: a proposed reclamation project on the island’s southern side will unalterably change the local environment for the worse. But that’s fine, as far as some prominent local state officials are concerned. “We don’t deny that [the environment will be altered], but what we have…

The environment on Penang remains constantly under attack. Bit by bit development on the island continues to encroach on wooded hills and sandy beaches, threatening local ecosystems. Local environmentalist groups have been raising the alarm about such developments and enlisting locals to help protect the island’s forests. Now beaches, too, might need similar…

Ask Prime Minister Najib Razak and his ministers, and Malaysia is among the world’s leading nations when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. By 2020, the date when an international action plan on carbon reductions comes into effect, Malaysia will have reduced its emissions by 40% compared to 2005…

If you needed any more proof of the wanton disregard people worldwide have for wild animals, you got it recently when news came of a jaguar being shot dead following an Olympic ceremony in Brazil. What was the jaguar, not being a sports fan presumably, doing there? The feline was used…

All Malaysians must work together to stop wildlife trafficking once and for all. If we don’t act decisively, many of the country’s most beloved and iconic species are doomed to die out. That is the message of one of Malaysia’s best-known environmentalist groups, Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM). “If illegal wildlife…