China's threatened elephants turn into killers

Local people believe the animals are getting angry as the country's runaway development destroys ever more of their habitat

Dinah Gardner, The Independent 26 Oct 08;

There are fewer than 300 wild elephants left in China, so when Jeremy McGill, an American tourist, stumbled across a group of adults earlier this year in a nature reserve in Yunnan province, near the border with Laos, he whipped out his camera and started taking pictures. It almost cost him his life.

"I was alone when I came across the four elephants," he said. "One scooped me up into his mouth and bit me. My body was folded in half, my head between my knees, and then the elephant spat me out and stomped on me. Suddenly they stopped and walked away. I was found about an hour later, just lying there with my intestines hanging out of my body."

A few weeks later, a Chinese migrant worker returning to his home village was stamped to death by an elephant. In Wild Elephant Valley, the same reserve where Mr McGill was attacked, a woman selling food was killed in June. Elephants will get aggressive if they feel threatened, but so many attacks in the space of six months is unusual, according to Grace Gabriel, Asia regional director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), who has worked on elephant conservation projects in China for a decade.

Humans and elephants are coming into contact increasingly frequently as Yunnan's development sees forests cut down to make way for rubber and paper plantations, new highways, dam projects and factories. China's elephant population is split into nine groups in isolated pockets of jungle that are becoming ever smaller, but Ms Gabriel thinks this is not the only cause of fatal encounters. Like local people, she believes the elephants are angry.

In recent years, she points out, several baby elephants have been caught in traps set by poachers for other animals. But when they are rescued by the local nature conservation authority, they are not released back into the wild, and she says at least two have died in captivity. Jin Yanfei, an ecology student from Beijing Normal University who studies the elephants in Wild Elephant Valley, said local officials wanted to breed elephants to perform tricks for tourists and to sell on to zoos.

Two young elephants are being kept at Wild Elephant Valley's "propagation centre". The youngest, Yongyong, was rescued last year when he was a few months old – in the wild, elephants normally stay with their mothers until they are least eight years old. We found him alone in a bare concrete yard, pacing agitatedly as far as the chain on his front leg would allow. I was told that Yongyong was kept like this 24 hours a day; after a few minutes, an official from the centre ushered us away.

Zhang Jun, a taxi driver in nearby Jinghong, the regional capital, spelled out the local view. "The park took in an injured elephant a few years ago, and the family came looking for her," he said. "That's why they've been attacking people. Everyone knows the elephants are angry."

Local farmers are also angry about loss of their crops to marauding elephants. Over the past three years the provincial government has paid out an average of about 5m yuan (£460,000) a year in compensation, but this covers only 30 per cent of the damage at most. Although poaching for ivory is a problem in Laos and Vietnam, Chinese farmers have not so far tried to harm or kill the elephants. Apart from the fact that guns are illegal, killing elephants, which are a protected species, carries a possible death penalty.

Ms Gabriel is campaigning for forest corridors to join up the patches of jungle where China's remaining elephants live. "These elephants have nowhere to go," she said. "If these habitats are not linked, if corridors are not built, China may not have wild elephants 100 years from now."