Nearly 90 elephants are found dead near wildlife sanctuary in Botswana after being hunted for their tusks

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Nearly 90 elephants were found slaughtered near a famous wildlife sanctuary in Botswana making the scale of poaching deaths the largest seen in Africa. 

An aerial survey conducted by Dr Mike Chase from Elephants Without Borders found as many of the 87 dead elephants that had been killed for their tusks just weeks ago, including five white rhinos also poached in three months.

'The scale of elephant poaching is by far the largest I've seen or read about anywhere in Africa to date,' Dr Mike Chase from Elephants Without Borders told the BBC.  

The conservation ecologist said he had recorded double the number of poached elephants than anywhere else in Africa when compared to figures from the 2015 Great Elephant Census.

That census estimated a third of Africa's elephants had been killed in the last decade and 60 per cent of Tanzania's elephants had been lost in five years.