Man-elephant Conflict: Extinction of Elephants?

Other Articles in the Elephant Series:

Elephants in Indian Culture

Elephants as Intelligent Creatures

I had planned to write the third part of the series on elephants starting with the capture and training of elephants, the difficulties faced in such an endeavor, proceeding later to man-elephant conflict that threatens the very survival of elephants.

But a video threw me off this plan. For quite sometime after I watched this video, I was dazed and shaken.

Not that I was naive enough to believe that violence did not exist in the world. It did exist and that too mostly against the defenceless. But when you witness such shameless and reprehensible acts of madness, something tugs crudely hard at your soul and I didn’t attempt to write anything for a day.

The videos are by the well-known environmentalist, Indian documentary maker and three-times winner of Green Oscar, Mike Pandey. His documentary The Last Migration that won the first Panda Award in 1994 shows how deforestation and human encroachment into elephant migratory routes had led to man-elephant confrontation and capture. His next award winner entry, The Vanishing Giants, shows the brutal capture and subsequent death of a young tusker in a capture operation headed by Prabhati Barua, a well known woman mahout from Assam. The elephant had its tusks hacked off with a blunt saw and kept without food or water for three days. Suffering from acute dehydration, it even tried to suck up wet mud before it died 18 days later. Mike was shocked by the callousness of the officials that he turned the documentary into a short news feature that was broadcast in the TV channels. This news feature exposes the cruel and archaic method called Mela Shikar way of capturing by lassoing a wild elephant from the back of a trained elephant called a koonki. 

Mike demanded immediate cessation of capture of elephants in this brutal way. Within 3 days of the release of this news feature the Government of India suspended capture of wild elephants and also the officers in charge of the operation.

Man-Elephant Conflicts

During dry seasons, elephant herds, led by the eldest elephant, follow traditional seasonal migration routes in search of food and water. Elephants are herbivores and need 150 to 300kg of jungle fodder or 6 to 8% of their body weight in food each day.

Sometimes, the elephants get killed by speeding trains.

Source for both pictures: Assam Chronicle

When humans encroach the forest land for farming, mining or other purposes, elephants raid farms and human settlements and get killed by angry villagers. I wouldn’t blame the villagers: who wouldn’t be angry if these poor people are frustrated by the pachyderm’s turning their months-long hard work into mud? Despite this, rarely do villagers resort to wanton killings. They have devised ingenious methods to drive away the elephants. The following videos show the use of ropes smeared with a sticky mix of chillies, tobacco leaves and engine oil.

Here’s another method using chillies as well as small crackers to keep the elephants at bay.

The Asian elephant is found in the wild in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

An estimate made in June 2003 puts the Asian elephant population below 30,000. India’s elephant population is estimated between 10,000 and 15,000, the largest in Asia. About half of these are found in the north-eastern states of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya.

Researchers claim that elephants face the risk of extinction by 2020. A major threat to elephant survival is illegal hunting of elephants for ivory. This will be dealt with in a subsequent article.

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