Balancing Asian elephant conservation with human interests

By Charles Santiapillai

JAKARTA (JP): It is difficult to imagine Asia without its elephants, for they are so much a part of its history, culture, religion, literature and mythology. The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is one of a handful of so called megaherbivores -- large, plant-eating land mammals, such as the rhinoceros, hippopotamus and giraffe, that typically attain an adult body mass of one metric ton or 1,000 kg.

It is also one of the most seriously endangered species of large mammals in the world. There are only about 40,000 Asian elephants surviving in the wild today, compared to more than half-a-million African elephants (Loxodonta africana) that are estimated to roam Africa.

The original range of the Asian elephant extended from the Euphrates-Tigris river systems in the west, across Asia south of the Himalayas, to Indochina and most of southern China in the east. The Asian elephant has declined both in range and number since the turn of the century. Today the species occurs in 13 countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

Within this range, however, the wild habitat actually available for it has shrunk to less than 500,000 sq km -- about the size of Thailand alone -- and continues to disappear as a result of forest loss. When elephants lose their range, they die.

The Asian elephant is threatened almost everywhere in its range by indiscriminate hunting, habitat destruction and the retaliatory attacks of farmers whose expanding croplands are often devastated by the movements of increasingly hemmed-in elephant populations.

While the African elephant's misfortune is its tusks, which are carried by both males and females, ivory poaching may be a relatively minor problem in much of Asia because all females and some males lack tusks.

Tusklessness

The proportion of tuskers among Asian elephant bulls varies from less than 7 percent in Sri Lanka to over 90 percent in Southern India. Tusklessness may be a blessing in disguise for many Asian elephant populations.

Parity between the sexes at birth occurs in most mammals. The 'natural' adult sex-ratio is unlikely to be equal in any polygynous mammal and in the case of the elephant, it is usually female-biased. Therefore, in such instances, the selective hunting of males would further exacerbate this disparity.

In areas where tuskers are few, a low male mortality rate will narrow the disparity, while in areas where tuskers are numerous, a high male mortality rate, brought about through increased poaching, will widen the disparity considerably. This has been observed in the elephant population inhabiting the Periyar Tiger Reserve in Kerala, South India, where the ratio of adult male to female seems to have skewed progressively from about 1:6 in 1969, to 1:19 in 1977-1979, and then skewed substantially to 1:71 in 1980-1982 before reaching a peak of 1:122 in 1987-1989! This is an unusual case.

In general, the Asian elephant is threatened more by habitat fragmentation and loss as a result of burgeoning human populations, which in turn leads to increasing conflict between man and elephant.

In the words of Holly Dublin, a senior conservation advisor to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the human-elephant conflict appears to have replaced poaching as the elephant's major threat today. This conflict in Asia is real and it seems to be heading in just one direction: the destruction and eventual elimination of elephants, unless innovative measures are adopted now to address the concerns of the farmers and mitigate the problems faced by the rural poor.

Elephant populations comprise of two fundamental social units. The first is the family unit or the herd, which is a cohesive group consisting usually of a matriarch (the oldest female and the leader), her daughters and their offspring.

Within this family all the members are related to each other and therefore the social bonds between them are very strong. Larger families with more female caretakers (allomothers) have a higher calf survival rate than do smaller families.

The second unit refers to the bull group, which is a loose temporary aggregation of often unrelated males. Within a herd, the females reach sexual maturity between nine years and 12 years old, while the males become sexually active slightly later, between 12 years and 15 years. As the young males reach sexual maturity, they are gradually forced out of the natal herd in order to prevent inbreeding.

It is these displaced bulls that go on to form the bull groups. Even though a bull is technically sexually mature when it is between 12 years and 15 years of age, and yet to successfully mate with a female, it has to attain the so-called "social maturity" which may take another five or eight years.

It is the size, more than the age of the bull that matters when it comes to breeding. One way to increase body size is to feed on highly nutritious plants. An adult bull elephant needs to consume about 150 kg of food per day. In order to accumulate so much food, it spends between 17 and 19 hours every day foraging.

Unfortunately, many wild plants are very poor in nutritional value compared to cultivated plants such as rice, sugar cane, maize and finger millet etc.

Not surprisingly then, bull elephants travel long distances in search of nutrition-rich plants cultivated by farmers. As a consequence of their social organization, adult bull elephants are inherently more predisposed to raiding crops than adult cows.

High-risk strategy

Adult bulls adopt a high-risk, high-gain strategy and are often killed when they enter cultivated areas. The sheer size and gargantuan appetite of elephants mean that they and people cannot live together where agriculture is the dominant form of land use.

Adult tuskless bulls make up almost 90 percent of all the crop-raiding elephants that are killed by farmers in Sri Lanka. These animals are killed neither for the ivory (which they lack) nor for the meat (which is not eaten by Sri Lankans and many other Asians).

Therefore the slaughter of elephants is not the result of increased demand for ivory, meat or hide. Instead, as Zimbabwe's well known wildlife biologist, Graham Child, argues, the real cause may lie in how people perceive the value of elephants.

It all boils down to the fact that in many Asian countries, there seems to be no advantage to the ordinary man of having elephants around. For those people who live next to a protected area, the presence of elephants is a curse. Thus the killing of an elephant removes a pest.

Somewhere a reserve ends, and the community begins. Parks and reserves are not islands, and elephants spill over and range frequently outside the borders of even the largest conservation areas in Asia.

Therefore, conflict between elephants and people is inevitable. A peasant family's staple food crop for a year can be destroyed in a single night by elephants, at times accompanied by the deaths of members of the family.

Unless such losses are compensated adequately and promptly, farmers will call for the destruction of the elephants that endanger their lives and destroy their crops. There is a relationship between tolerance to wildlife and human population density.

The origins of human-elephant conflict can be traced to the fact that at any but the lowest density, large wild animals and human beings are fundamentally incompatible. As Graham Child points out, elephants are incompatible with peasant agriculture unless the damage they cause can be compensated.

In managing elephants in the wild, two closely related issues have emerged.

The first concerns the impact of an increasing number of elephants on the habitat within protected areas. The concentration of elephants in limited areas could lead to a build up in their densities locally, even though absolute population sizes could be decreasing.

The second relates to the expansion of human settlements into elephant habitats outside protected areas, as a result of a combination of high human population growth and deteriorating land fertility rural areas, and the development of elephant ranges outside protected areas, which has resulted in the escalation of conflict between man and elephant.

Year by year, as forested areas are opened up, wilderness areas become smaller and smaller and, ultimately, elephants have to feed on the crops planted for use of man.

Elephants, like other wildlife, have lost so much of their former habitat, that they are now being forced to invade the communities that have displaced them. The survival of elephants in such areas is possible only if the people are prepared to tolerate the animals on their land. Herein lies the crux of the human-elephant conflict in Asia.

Benefits

The key to mitigating human-elephant conflict in Asia is to first and foremost encourage the adoption of sensible land-use strategies that minimize conflict, and to ensure that in areas where people and elephants do overlap, people derive tangible benefits from the presence of the elephants.

Furthermore, in areas where elephant depredations impoverish the people, their losses must be promptly and adequately compensated.

The trick is to convert the liability into an asset. Chronic crop-raiding elephants can be captured, domesticated and put to good use by man.

Asian elephants seem to have lost ground to the machine in recent decades. But there is a growing recognition of their merits, particularly in the forestry industry, since they can extract timber with much less incidental damage to the environment than machines.

The elephant is the jungle's perfect cross-country vehicle. All over Asia, domesticated elephants have been used in war and peace.

In Assam, in northeast India, elephants have been put to work ploughing farmland and pounding rice. Everywhere in the region, they used to be the backbone of the timber industry, and today in Burma, more than 5,000 trained elephants are still used in teak lumbering.

It is in this latter role that elephants could be most useful today, when rapid but wasteful mechanical logging techniques result in so much incidental environmental damage. Elephants, used selectively for logging operations in production forests, could be the basis for a comparatively benign, much less destructive mode of resource extraction. The elephant's advantages in forestry operations -- both economic and environmental -- are many and well proven.

Investment

A fully trained elephant is an investment for a lifetime. A 20-year old trained elephant in Thailand costs about US$10,000 and its working life after purchase may continue for another 30 years. Compare this with the $100,000 to $140,000 price for a crawler tractor, which has a working life of only six years and requires a continuous supply of diesel fuel.

Elephants remove the need for expensive access roads for heavy machinery. Of itself, the construction of such roads destroys a great deal of forest growth. But it also opens the interior to slash-and-burn farmers and poachers, who level whatever forest growth remains after the prime timber has been cut.

Elephant-based logging eliminates this danger. And unlike machinery, elephants do not rust, corrode or pollute the environment. They do not need expensive spare parts -- which must be trucked in along more roads in vehicles using still more nonrenewable petroleum fuels.

Their dung acts as fertilizer as well as an agent of seed dispersal in the forest, automatically reforesting even as they remove trees. Their feeding thins the undergrowth in such a way as to enhance the germination and growth of many tree seeds, thus further fostering reforestation.

Encouraging the elephants' use in forestry and other industries, such as ecotourism, and using the revenues so generated to improve the livelihood of the rural poor offers a way of reducing the conflict between people and elephants.

The revenues can be used to build dispensaries, grinding mills, supply clean water, or even manufacture paper out of elephant dung in the areas where people often bear the brunt of elephant depredations.

Conservation in any developing country has to sustain not only the spirit but also the stomach. Any elephant conservation plan that ignores the legitimate aspirations of the people who share their land with elephants is doomed to failure.

The needs of both humans and elephants must be addressed in areas where they compete for the limited resources of the land. The best opportunity for conservation of elephants in Asia seems to lie in some form of multiple-use pattern of rangelands development.

Elephant conservation in Asia has everything to gain from the people who share their lands with the animals, if they have a direct stake in ensuring the wellbeing and abundance of the wild animals in their neighborhood.

As Clive Stockill, one of the people who helped start the CAMPFIRE (Community Areas Management Program for Indigenous Resources) scheme in Zimbabwe points out, "The message is simple -- if wild animals benefit the community, they will not become extinct".

The writer is from the Department of Zoology, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.