Fighting for their territory

NEW DELHI: Not just life’s pressures, social stress and even a sort of road rage is afflicting wild elephants in India. And this is a direct consequence of growing human presence, climate change and dwindling habitat and food and water that is increasingly bringing them up against humans.

Nearly 300 persons are killed every year by wild elephants in India. The figure was as low as 200 till year 1999-2000 - an indicator of the growing human-elephant conflict.

Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful co-existence, there is now hostility and violence. It was usually attributed to high testosterone levels in male elephants in ‘musth’ during mating season or to the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. In ‘Elephant Breakdown,’ an essay in the journal ‘Nature’, Gay Bradshaw and her colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of killings and habitat loss, they claim, have disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations in the herds and affected the milieu in which young elephants have been raised in the wild.

This is a phenomenon witnessed all across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia. Shrinking and fragmentation of their habitat, disruption of natural corridors they use to migrate from one area to another, dwindling food and water forcing them to move out to look for sustenance of the herd and humans encroaching into their areas bring them into unwanted contact and conflict with people. 

Elephants have a matriarchal society and the female is extremely protective and possessive about the calves. She does not like any disturbance to the herd. Any perception of danger triggers a violent reaction from the herd. And requirement for its sustenance drives the herd to what seems ‘drastic’ action to villagers - breaking into huts where harvested crop is stored, plundering the fields and, if disturbed, turning violent.

Male elephants turning into adults and thrown out of the herd - “to prevent inbreeding”, explained an officer - are also troublesome. Left alone, unwanted by the herd they grew up with, they are temperamental and short tempered. While greater forest cover earlier kept them away from contact with humans, they now frequently come face to face with each other.

With their habitats under pressure, elephant herds have moved into areas they have not been seen in for decades. According to AN Prasad, Director, Project Elephant, elephants have phenomenally long memories and in many parts of the country, facing shortage of food and water, they have started exploring and going back to areas they had abandoned earlier. They are seen once again in Tirupati. For the last decade or so, they have been found in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. And, when Bellary region started turning dry, they forayed into neighbouring, water-rich Maharashtra.

If a herd on the move encounters obstacles from human settlements, the two react according to their earlier experience — or lack of it. Unsavoury encounters can provoke attacks. “Even in cities there are incidents of people shooting at others due to ‘road rage’,” said PR Sinha, Director of Wildlife Institute of India.

In India, elephant habitats have fragmented into 88 patches in the country, said Sinha, and this is increasing under pressure of human population. This often throws man and animal in confrontational situations. “It is not accidental; it is imminent,” said Sinha.