Elephants not about to pack up their trunks

Giant creatures fight back as human activities encroach on their habitats
Nirmal Ghosh Straits Times 22 Apr 12;

Narendra terrified people whenever he emerged from the forest to walk through a new herbal garden set up near the town of Rishikesh in northern India, where the Ganges gushes out of the high mountains to meet the plains.

The big bull elephant - hurt, angry and confused to find his old habitat altered and teeming with human beings - fought back, killing people and trashing walls and small buildings.

Finally, in January, a team of wildlife managers subdued him with a tranquilliser dart, roped him and transported him many kilometres away to be released deep in the jungle.

Narendra was not a 'rogue' or hardened killer elephant, insists wildlife warden Brijendra Singh, who was part of the operation.

Across India and the rest of Asia, conflicts between man and elephant are on the rise, with regular reports of rampaging beasts and human casualties in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.

'The herbal garden is constructed right on the old elephant track, virtually blocking off a centuries-old forest corridor used by the elephants,' wrote Mr Singh in a personal e-mailed note on the episode.

'We have paid heavily for this by having innocent people killed by confused and irritable elephants in chance encounters.'

Calling the herbal garden a huge mistake, he said it was pushed through by a powerful politician, who wanted a fitting tribute for his late wife.

The elephant in question, nicknamed Narendra, had become bold and fearless after daily close encounters with people.

The elephant had been shot at, and had boiling water and oil and flaming sacks hurled at it, said Mr Singh. 'Humans were everywhere. There was no place for the elephant to go.'

When Bangalore-based elephant scientist Raman Sukumar first began his field work in the early 1980s, around 150 people were being killed by wild elephants across India every year.

Today, the annual figure has risen to more than 400.

Elephant communities are highly evolved and family ties are close. The killing of individual elephants for ivory, or through culling in Africa to keep populations down, disrupts the family hierarchy and community structure.

In his field work in one location in south India, Dr Sukumar noted that female elephants often became unusually angry and charged at him; he noticed that the area had seen big males killed, depriving families of the alpha male and making females more aggressive.

The invasion of forests by roads, mines, loggers and plantations has degraded and fragmented the elephant habitat.

And with crops such as rice and sugar cane edging closer to forest habitats, elephants are known to raid crops even if their own habitat offers good forage. Ripe sugarcane is to an elephant like a chocolate brownie to a 10-year-old child.

This has brought elephants into contact with humans more often, setting off reprisals and a spiral of conflict.

A growing body of research is now documenting how elephants suffer post traumatic stress disorder, and damaged communities produce dysfunctional and dangerous individuals. This is much like in human societies which, under stress produce aberrant behaviour.

This phenomenon is at its worst in some parts of Africa where culling - referred to as 'lethal management' - is in practice.

This has decimated elephant societies, leaving orphans deprived of social conditioning and growing up angry. Some wildlife biologists are now advocating birth control through a long-acting vaccine contraceptive, rather than culling.

The impact of broken societies has been seen not only in elephant communities.

When dingoes - feral dogs - on Australia's Fraser Island were shot to control their population growth, the survivors became more aggressive and there have been recent cases of tourists being attacked.

There is gathering evidence that supports the premise that elephants become aggressive towards humans only in response to aggression by humans. In some places in Africa and India, such aggressive behaviour declines when hunting pressures ease and an elephant population is protected and left undisturbed.

'A whole generation of elephants since the 1990s has grown up seeing nothing but conflict in some places,' says Kathmandu-based Dr A. Christy Williams, coordinator of the World Wide Fund for Nature Asian Rhino and Elephant Action Strategy.

'There are now elephants who are 25 years old and have been chased by humans since the day they were born. They don't know what it is like to have a normal life. Since they have been calves they have been chased and harassed,' said Dr Williams.

'If they are growing up with conflict they quickly realise humans can only make a lot of noise and throw things at them, and if they charge them, the humans will run away and are easy to kill. Once they start doing that, they do it again and again.'

Nirmal Ghosh has been involved in elephant conservation in India for more than 20 years, has made films on elephants and is a former member of the Steering Committee of the Government of India's Project Elephant.

DISAPPEARING HABITATS

Asian elephants are hard to count because they inhabit dense forests. Estimates place their numbers in the wild at between 37,000 and 51,000, and at about 15,000 in captivity.

But this population is spread thin - across 14 countries, such as India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and peninsular Malaysia.

A subspecies found in Borneo has suffered from the galloping expansion of oil palm plantations.

As Asia's economies grow rapidly, big infrastructure projects such as dams and highways; and mines and plantations have shrunk the elephant habitat, precipitating increasing conflict between man and beast with casualties on both sides.