A blessing and a curse, the elephant tusk is actually an elongated incisor tooth. Elephants use their tusks for many things, including fending off predators or other elephants, foraging for food, stripping bark from trees and for moving larger objects out of the way. Unfortunately, humans have many uses for  tusks too, which has led to wide scale poaching over the years and the near eradication of the species before stricter laws were enforced. Elephants have been so decimated by poaching, in fact, that the gene that produces larger tusks has almost been bred out of the species. As a result, today’s elephants have smaller tusks than they did a hundred years ago.