When Will The Great Human Elephant War End?

Image: Bernard Dupont/Flickr

Humans are at war. They’re at war with each other, they’re at war with themselves, and some are at war with elephants. Researchers want to know how humans and the long-snooted aggressors can live in peace.

Northern Botswana is a hotspot in the ongoing human-elephant conflict, with 16,000 people trying to coexist with 11,000 elephants. As humans take up more and more space in the area to farm, the result has been crop-raids (elephants eating or damaging crops) and casualties on both sides. There are a few hundred elephant raids annually in Botswana alone, and hundreds of people have died worldwide from run-ins with elephants. So it’s understandably hard to convince the locals to protect the vulnerable African Elephant population when they keep raiding their farmland. But American and British scientists have realized it’s also difficult to predict and understand these complex interactions.



They found that the human population grew from around 2,000 to over 17,000 from 1971 to 2015, but the rate of growth slowed down. Meanwhile, the elephant populations seemed to increase exponentially from 1990 to 2015, from almost 3,000 to over 11,000. The amount of allocated farmland hasn’t increased by much over the same time period and has actually decreased in the past few years. Their findings surprised them, though: despite the increased populations of both people and pachyderms, the number of raids has seemed to decrease in the past ten years. And the models they built gave completely different predictions based on the amount of time they spanned.

All that made the researchers wonder what was actually causing the human-elephant conflicts if more inhabitants doesn’t mean more fighting. “Rather, it is the use of space and competition for resources between people and elephants that likely determines the level of conflict,” the researchers write in the study, published yesterday in PLOS One. That means that more farmland might mean more conflict, and reducing the number of crop raids might be as simple as more effective land use.


There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the findings. They’re based on a model, which built both estimates and a few different data sources, including self-reported data on an emotionally charged issue. There are so many factors that can go into whether or not elephants will raid farms, which is itself only one facet of the whole matter. Human-elephant conflict will continue to be an issue across the world—hundreds are killed annually by elephants in India as well. On top of that, Africa’s elephants, as well as their rhinos and other wildlife, already suffer from the poaching crisis. Also, who are we to go in there and think we can just fix everything?



[PLOS One]

Source : https://gizmodo.com/when-will-the-great-human-elephant-war-end-1795830246

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