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Finding answers to elephant-human conflicts

As WWF’s Asian programmes co-ordinator Christy Williams relates from his own experience, there’s often conflict whenever humans and elephants try to live in the same environment. But there can be solutions – and all of us can play a part

As night fell, I worked fast to fix the tracking collar around the wild matriarch elephant’s neck. Just minutes earlier, she’d sent me on an undignified flight through the air with a swish of her trunk – despite her being almost fully sedated.

To avoid a second hit, I crouched uncomfortably under the belly of a large, trained male elephant standing alongside her. An experienced veteran vital to our task of tranquillising and collaring wild elephants, this big tusker remained unruffled.

But I was still disconcerted and nervous, as her family herd trumpeted angrily from just beyond the surrounding bushes. They were being kept at bay by another camp-friendly tusker and his mahout, or trainer, who used mock charges and shouting to dissuade them.

By the time the job was done it was pitch black, and we hit the sack, exhausted.

This was November 2006, and we were in an illegal coffee plantation inside the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia.

My WWF colleagues and Indonesian government partners had summoned me urgently the previous week to help handle the crisis situation that had arisen thanks to this ‘problem’ herd. People were up in arms, threatening to kill the small herd – which had already been decimated at the hands of humans, reducing their number from over 30 in 2000 to just six by June 2006. The threat of a total wipeout was real and ominous, so we had to think fast.

We opted for an early-warning device involving a kind of GPS ‘sat-nav’ collar fixed on one of the elephants in the herd. By tracking signals three times a day, we could warn villagers ahead of the approaching elephants.

Roots of the conflict
Across Asia, deforestation for short-term commercial gain is a prime reason for once-extensive forests being whittled away. The area where we collared the elephants had already been converted to coffee by aggressive planters who in turn unfairly labelled the elephants as aggressors, even though they lived inside a legally designated park boundary.

I hoped the radio collars would help prevent the beleaguered elephants being killed in retaliation strikes by planters. An ‘easier’ solution might have been to do what Indonesians had been doing for ages – catch the elephants and condemn them to a life of captivity. But to my mind, this is a sure way to lose the conservation battle.

In the 15 years I’ve been involved in elephant conservation and research, the storyline of the Asian elephant is depressingly similar. The country, the people, the language or the retribution are different, but the cause for elephant-human conflict remains the same – humans displacing elephants from their natural habitat.

Twelve years ago, I trekked many miles to a remote village in the Garo Hills in north-east India to investigate the death of a two-month-old human infant killed by an elephant.

I tried to piece together the incident by talking to villagers via a translator. A bull elephant had entered the village – a cluster of bamboo huts on stilts – in search of food. In the commotion, a panic-stricken couple rushed out of their hut, leaving their sleeping infant inside. Before they could turn back, the elephant had pushed down the tiny hut, crushing the baby boy to death.

It broke my heart to see the mother’s raw pain as she talked about her son. She then asked why I was there, and I gave her an honest reply – I was seeking ways to reduce the elephant-human conflict and so help safeguard the future of the elephant. With a sudden fire in her eyes, she said if people like me were so interested in conserving elephants, we should take them with us and tie them in our backyards.

Nightmarish experience
That comment stayed in my mind, and the significance of the words came to haunt me a few years later when I was carrying out field research in Rajaji in northern India.

Elephants would sometimes come to our camp and sniff about for the miniscule quantities of cooking salt we’d leave for them under a tree – we baited them with salt in order to measure their height against the tree.

Not realising the significance of my actions, I left a bag of salt in my kitchen overnight. When darkness fell, a herd of elephants came visiting and pretty much smashed my kitchen, took the bag of salt and spread it around the field camp. For the next two months, we had elephants visiting us every night looking for salt in the soil around the camp.

It was a nightmarish experience – we would often lie awake, jumping at the slightest noise, and rush outside shouting and screaming to disperse the persistent herd. And we were in a solid concrete field camp! Imagine the psychological impact of elephant raids on villagers living in fragile mud and bamboo huts.

Being on the receiving end certainly helped me have a deeper understanding of what this conflict really means for all concerned.

Looking for answers
Humans undoubtedly trigger the conflict, but the solutions are far from easy. It’s vital that answers are based on understanding the behaviour of these intelligent animals.

• Elephants need about 150-200sq km of forests, defined as a home range.
• Several groups may live within the same area, moving around in fixed seasonal patterns.
• A female elephant will live and die inside the home range where she was born. Elephants live for around 55-60 years in the wild.
• Males disperse from family groups at about 10 years old and may take 20 years before they settle into a home range.

Whenever elephant home ranges are contained within large forested habitats, there is very little conflict. Problems arise when small groups of people or individual families move in and clear forests within an elephant’s home range.

People might plant a field of rice paddy, wheat or sugarcane. To an elephant, these are just another type of tasty grass. They also like salt and home-made liquor, often stored in flimsy structures, which are pulled down in seconds by elephants.

The leap from crop-raiding to house-raiding can be instant. In the absence of technical help in creating humane solutions, people retaliate by throwing burning tyres, shooting at the beasts with sharpened nails, sometimes even laying out foods laced with killer pesticides, or electrocuting the animals with high-voltage transmission cables.

All this can have a psychological effect on elephant herds – aggressive responses breed yet more aggression in the elephants, especially the males.

Making matters worse
The greatest damage is done by sanctioned habitat clearing at the hands of short-sighted government officials who encourage large areas to be set aside for plantations, or projects such as dams or mines.

In these areas, elephants are virtually led to the slaughter by the very governments mandated to protect them. In India, we have seen this start with the collusion of corrupt officials and academics writing fake Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) designed to serve the interest of a small group of politicians or industrialists who profit from the untruths.

The ‘mitigation’ measures they suggest most often ignore elephant behaviour or ecology since the teams that carry out the EIA seldom have either the expertise or the sensitivity to deal with such delicate issues.

In countries such as Indonesia, the brutality is mind-numbing. In the province of Riau on the island of Sumatra, over a period of 30 months from September 2000, it was estimated that 105 out of 117 captured elephants (93%) died in captivity or immediately after translocation.

Elephants have also disappeared from many parts of peninsular Malaysia and are on the verge of extinction in Vietnam, a process hastened there by a lethal combination of poaching and conflict.

Seeing both sides
Two months ago, I received word that the herd in Sumatra whose matriarch we had collared had killed a human mother and child in an illegal settlement within the park (they were the only people who had not moved from the settlement, despite being warned by our field team).

A few days later, I was sent images of two elephants killed in retaliation. As a biologist, I was filled with utter despair for the fate of the pachyderms. As a father of two young children, I was wracked by the human tragedy, and remembered my own frightening time spent in that dark forest building as marauding elephants milled around me.

What we can do
There are no winners when elephants and humans clash. Everyone loses. WWF continues to explore ways in which conflicts can be minimised or avoided – in particular by working to reduce deforestation. And we can all help exert pressure to encourage positive changes, even from here in the UK.

For instance, palm oil from South-east Asia is used in everyday items like creamers and biscuits and in cosmetics like lipsticks. WWF is urging governments and industry bodies to ban imports from companies that continue to convert primary rainforests into oil palm plantations.

Consumer action also helps – by reading package labels, asking retailers and manufacturers whether the ‘vegetable oil’ on an ingredients list means ‘palm oil’, and then asking where it comes from .

You can...

• read more about WWF’s work with elephants and their human neighbours
• adopt an elephant
• get updates from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

Related links

• Asian elephants
• Adopt an elephant
• Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil
• Safeguarding the natural world

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