Human Elephant Conflict: No sign of easing
During the colonial period, British hunters killed thousands of elephants, even offering rewards for those who killed the beasts. A report indicates that more than 5,000 elephants were systematically eliminated within a period of 10 years during British rule, with some hunters like Major Thomas William Rogers slaughtering 1,400 elephants.
Elephants are now a protected species. But in the past ten years, around 3000 elephants have been killed, primarily because of the Human Elephant Conflict (HEC) that reached its peak in 2022 with a toll of 145 human and 439 elephant lives. The official elephant number of Sri Lanka is around 6,000 and the country now loses more than 5% of the total elephant population annually. If no action is taken this would further escalate and this is not a pressure Sri Lanka’s elephant population can bear in the long run, warns Prof. Devaka Weerakoon, an expert on the ecology and behaviour of Asian Elephants.
During the last ten years, the Human Elephant Conflict (HEC) had claimed nearly a thousand lives. Elephants occupy over 60% land area and as people are resident in nearly 70% of the elephant range, HEC is inevitable, but unplanned development has made it worse over the last few decades. The mega irrigation projects in the post-colonial period aimed at cultivating the lands in the dry zone are a root of this conflict as the behaviour and the needs of elephants were not properly addressed,” says Prof. Weerakoon.
Elephants were driven out of many of their traditional grounds and the idea was to restrict them to protected areas. But protected areas are mainly demarcated as hydrocatchments of large reservoirs rather than areas aimed at conservation. “No proper habitat enrichments in these protected areas were carried out reducing their carrying capacity, so not finding enough food in these protected areas, they had only two choices; either die of starvation or come out of the fences and find food elsewhere,” says Prof. Weerakoon.
The Anuradhapura District experiences the worst of the HEC. Last year 37 human lives and 90 elephants were lost. Polonnaruwa remains second with 18 human lives together with 73 elephants killed. The main livelihood of people in both these districts is paddy cultivation. “In the Polonnaruwa District farmers face a range of issues from lack of fertilizer to water shortages, but above all, the Human Elephant Conflict (HEC) remains the district’s worst issue, says Polonnaruwa Divisional Secretary Dharmasiri Weerathunga. In most cases, it is the breadwinner of the family who gets killed due to elephant attacks, putting the whole family in jeopardy, so HEC has become a socio-economic issue for the district that is already stricken by poverty, Mr. Weerathunga said.
The government pays one million rupees to the families for deaths. Property loss or crop damages also take a big financial toll. The government also spends a colossal sum on HEC mitigation activities such as constructing electric fences, distributing elephant crackers, and translocating elephants. In 2019 and 2020, Rs 490 million was used to build 4,756 km of electric fences, but the statistics indicate the solutions failed to achieve the intended results.
“The HEC mitigating actions fail because they are not in line with the solutions backed by science,” says Dr. Sumith Pilapitiya, former Director General of Department of Wildlife Conservation. It is proven that translocations, elephant drives, or building electric fences along administrative boundaries would not work, but we keep on trying them, mostly as politicians want quick solutions, Dr. Pilapitiya said.
Sri Lanka’s elephant conservation policy was adopted in 2006. In 2020, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse formed a presidential committee to come up with a national action plan that sadly became just another document on the shelf.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe has set up another committee to oversee the implementation of this action plan in July last year under Dr. Pilapitiya. Other than wildlife and forest departments, this committee consists of local agencies that can contribute to escalating the HEC as well as those that can assist in controlling it.
“Based on scientific analysis, the electric fence is still the most effective solution, but their success depends on the location and how the fence is maintained,” Dr. Pilapitiya says. In the last 25 years, we have been placing them on administrative boundaries of the protected areas under the Wildlife Department where sometimes elephants are found on both sides of the fence. The elephant doesn’t understand the human’s administrative boundaries and moves through ecological boundaries, so the new action plan aims at relocating these fences between elephant habitats and non-elephant habitats,” Dr. Pilapitiya said.
The plan also encourages community fencing around the villages and agriculture plots. Villagers are expected to be part of maintaining these fences with the support of the government agencies active at the field level such as divisional secretariats. The plan will be first implemented in Anuradhapura and Kurunegala Districts.
We need to find innovative methods, such as ways to increase the productivity in agricultural lands without trying to clear more forests in order not to let the HEC escalate further, says Prof. Weerakoon who is not very optimistic about a meaningful solution being achieved without the necessary political will.