Well, here’s something depressing as hell: the Associated Press has the story of Congolese rangers engaged in violent conflict with armed outlaw groups who are targeting African elephants for slaughter. Damn.

The eight suspected poachers stood under a tree, apparently unaware they were being tracked by 10 rangers from Congo’s Garamba National Park. But as the rangers approached, gunfire rang out from the tall grass nearby, where other heavily armed men were hidden. The dragnet swiftly turned into a desperate fight for survival.

The shootout last month, in which three rangers and a Congolese army colonel were killed, highlights the challenge of protecting parks in a part of Africa plagued for decades by insurgencies, civil war, refugee flows and weak governments.

The details in this report are staggering. Garamba’s elephant population has declined over the last two decades from more than 11,000 to fewer than 2,000 as of April 2014, and another 200 have been poached since then.

Garamba is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but it is now apparently something like a war-zone. The park has roughly 180 personnel, armed with “old firearms,” doing battle against militia groups and warlords and shit. A familiar name pops up in the report, too:

Garamba’s 120 rangers, backed by up to 60 Congolese soldiers, are trying to ward off rebels from nearby South Sudan, as well as ivory hunters and militias from Sudan and the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group led by warlord Joseph Kony, who is accused of war crimes.

Kony’s fighters are killing Garamba’s elephants and trading the ivory tusks for ammunition, food and uniforms in Sudanese-controlled territory, according to a report released last month by Enough Project, a watchdog group, whose findings were based on interviews with rebel defectors.

In the case at the center of the AP report, in which 10 rangers were ambushed by poachers, the high stakes faced by park rangers are starkly rendered: an unarmed park helicopter that flew in to support the rangers was fired upon by powerful belt-fed machine guns and had to bail out. Neither U.N. peacekeepers nor U.S. military personnel working with African soldiers in “other areas” were able to provide air support to assist the men.

The rangers were engaged by poachers on October 5th, but no real help of any kind came to the sight of the conflict until October 8th. By then, four of the men had been killed.

We’ve got Zimbabwean elephants being poisoned to death by the dozens, we’ve got Namibian rhinos being offered up for slaughter to wealthy westerners, and we’ve got well-armed outlaw militias waging war on conservation personnel. Conservation efforts need more money and more support, or a lot of majestic, threatened species are gonna go away forever.

Also, don’t buy ivory.

[Associated Press]