ELEPHANT‘DETECTIVES’ ON THE MOVE

PROSPEROUS Elephant, a small agricultural village in the hills of Sumatra island, in the province of Bengkulu, is a testament to happy days in human-elephant relations: When the village was founded in 1991, residents nursed an injured wild elephant back to health until it one day disappeared into the forest, never to be seen again.

But when wild elephants raided, villagers organised into brigades and used everything they could gather — pots and pans, a megaphone — to scare off the rampaging giants, forcing them to a palm oil plantation elsewhere.

It was just one example of how the rapid expansion of palm oil plantations into elephant territory here has brought humans and elephants into more frequent conflict, especially in remote villages far from ranger bases. Increasingly, that conflict is deadly. Sumatra, in western Indonesia, has one of the largest populations of Asian elephants outside India. But their numbers are decreasing quickly, from an estimated 2,800 in 2007 to around 1,700 in 2014, the most recent year there was a thorough count. Along with habitat destruction, poaching is considered a major threat to the species.

It is difficult to prosecute elephant poisonings and other wildlife crimes, which in Sumatra include tiger, orang utan and rhinoceros poaching. And that has spurred Indonesian conservation groups to go beyond their traditional advocacy work to conduct independent criminal investigations. The Wildlife Conservation Society began its wildlife investigations unit in 2003 and now leads seven teams of detectives around Indonesia who investigate wildlife killings — often undercover.

“The government’s resources to investigate are limited,” explained Dwi Adhiasto, who leads the group’s investigators in Indonesia. “To really conduct an investigation, you need a long time. Not a week, or a month, but sometimes a year.”