The lure and peril of southern Africa's elephants
http://www.latimes.com

Elephants are a lethal menace to villagers, threatening their lives and
crops. But they bring in tourists, and therefore money, so they are
rigorously protected -- more so than humans, critics say.

By Robyn Dixon
November 7, 2009

Reporting from Katubya, Zambia - Here's how to pitch this (true) story to
Hollywood: Ordinary guy named John, ordinary Sunday, cycling home into a
setting sun. Monster roars out of the bushes!

John abandons his bike, flees in terror. The creature smashes the bicycle,
catches him in a few short strides, grabs him by the shirt. But he slides
out of his shirt and falls to the ground.

It picks him up again and he slips out of his trousers. Naked, too afraid to
even to scream, he scrambles away. But he doesn't get far. The shrieking
monster smashes him against a tree.

Camera pans to an old lady approaching, unaware of the danger.

Within minutes she'll be lying on the path, crushed.

The Hollywood twist? These people live in a bizarre universe where the
rampaging monsters (and there are thousands of them) are protected and the
people are not.

Cut to the killer creatures grazing peacefully (cue close-up of gentle,
intelligent eyes with three-inch lashes) along with their unbearably cute
offspring.

Of course, to sell it, you'd need to change a few details: Lose the African
villagers; make them suburban Americans. And the monster couldn't be that
beloved giant, the elephant. Who would believe it?

::

The name of the dead man was John Muyengo, a 25-year-old from a village
called Katubya in southern Zambia. The woman was Mukiti Ndopu, highly
respected in the village, the wife of the chief.

A neighbor, Muyenga Katiba, 44, saw the elephant charge the young man on
that April day. He gathered his wife and children, and they cowered inside
his hut.

"The boy didn't even scream," Katiba said of Muygeno. "He just died
quietly."

Deaths like these are increasing in southern Zambia and northern Botswana,
where people are crammed in with a rising elephant population. There are no
reliable statistics on fatalities in southern Africa, but in one region of
southern Zambia alone, five people have died this year, compared with one
last year, according to Zambian press reports.

Elephants, endangered in Central Africa, are common in the south, mainly
because an international ban on ivory trading drastically cut poaching.

Today, Botswana has 151,000 elephants, and Namibia about 10,000. In southern
Zambia, the elephant population has more than doubled, from 3,000 to 7,000,
many of them "immigrants" from Zimbabwe, where poaching and hunting are
rife.

The animals capture people's imagination because they're intelligent,
emotional creatures. They mourn their dead and try to help tribe members who
get sick.

But as next-door neighbors? You pit yourself daily against highly
intelligent, dangerous thieves. You go hungry as they eat all your crops.
You're afraid to send your children to school, or your wife to the clinic.
But at some point you have to go to town for food, and you walk the dusty
red paths with fear in your heart.

If you get fed up and shoot an elephant, you'll be jailed, because the
animals are protected. They're seen as valuable to Zambia, because they
attract tourists, bringing millions in revenue.

But people aren't protected. Nor are their crops, or houses. There's no
compensation when someone is killed. So people living in elephant country
complain that governments and tourists like elephants more than people.

Albert Mumbeko, a former railway worker who's also from Katubya, lives in a
flimsy house of grass and sticks: That was the only barrier between him and
a massive bull elephant that woke the 76-year-old and his wife at midnight a
few months back.

It was gobbling down his small corn crop. Mumbeko crept out, heart beating
wildly. "I could see its eyes in the moonlight, big and fierce. It looked
very angry and aggressive. Its ears were open."

That's an elephant warning. He and his wife fled, but the elephant stomped
their house down. Then went on eating.

"We felt very angry, we felt very sad when we came back and saw our house
destroyed."

When he sees an elephant, he feels impotent fury. "We hate elephants.
They're all bad."

It's a warm October evening, a good time for elephant-spotting in Mosi O
Tunya National Park in southern Zambia. As the sky turns to slate, a group
of elephants swims across a river. Suddenly, the exhilarating sound of an
elephant trumpeting, right by the car.

Dozens of elephants meander peacefully or wallow in the water. One old bull
elephant splashes water over himself. Small elephants frolic.

One baby elephant, with mini-tusks, trots amid the matriarchal group. On
short legs, it gets a little left behind. It curls its little trunk into its
mouth and prances, breaking into a gallop to catch up with the big group.

Several open-topped safari vehicles chug alongside, as rangers exchange
radio intel on the best elephant viewing. All is quiet, except for the call
of birds, the engines and the ceaseless tweeting and clicking from the nest
of excited digital cameras.

Seasoned elephant watcher FerrelOsborn is awed by the creatures. That
doesn't mean he's sentimental about them.

"I'm fascinated by elephants," he says. "But I don't love them."

He's not the kind of conservationist who thinks that the real elephant
problem is people -- African overpopulation and habitat destruction.

He thinks that humans can live with elephants, as long as they take a few
simple precautions. One key is giving people a motive to try: At the moment,
the revenue generated by tourism doesn't trickle down to those whose
livelihoods are threatened by the animals.

His outfit, the Elephant Pepper Development Trust, hopes to preserve
elephants by helping farmers protect their crops, reducing conflict and
saving both human and animal lives.

The Zambia-based trust trains African farmers to repel elephants by using
chilies. Elephants hate chilies.

African farmers often burn chili as a repellent, but it's not enough. The
trust's method involves four simple steps, but takes a lot of work and
commitment.

The method: 1) Leave five yards of cleared space between the forest and the
fields. At night, smelling humans around, crossing the gap into a field
makes the elephants wary and nervous. 2) Plant a thick barrier of chilies
around the field. 3) Put up a fence with rope that has jangling cans (which
gives them a fright) and cloth flags coated with thick chili grease. 4) Burn
chilies, making pungent smoke.

The trust guarantees to buy back chilies grown from farmers and manufactures
its own Elephant Pepper brand chili spices and sauces, sold in southern
Africa and soon to hit the U.S. market. (They are already available to U.S.
customers via the group's website.) The profits go back into the trust.

"We say, 'We are not here to give you food or money,' " Osborn said. "
'We're here to give you an idea. It's up to you to take it up.' "

One Zambian farmer followed the method carefully and has successfully kept
elephants off his crops for three years. It was so successful that his
neighbors accused him of practicing witchcraft.

But the most important long-term solution, the foundation argues, is for
communities to stop settling and planting crops in established elephant
corridors.

"These corridors have been there for decades, so it's easier to move the
farmers rather than the corridors," Osborn said. But land use is a highly
sensitive issue, controlled by tribal chiefs, who decide who can live and
farm where. If your chief gives you land -- even in the middle of an
elephant corridor -- that's where you go. But passing elephants will gobble
the crop, and your family will be at risk of elephant attack.

The governments in the region don't do much to help farmers, according to
local aid organizations and farmers -- and the Elephant Pepper Development
Trust is too small and poorly funded to train every farmer in southern
Africa and supply chili repellent start-up kits.

Farmers, seeing few benefits flowing from tourism, resent the government's
inaction.

"The tourists come, but people here don't have safe drinking water and they
have poor schools, and they feel like they're not getting any benefit,"
Osborn said. "If the community could see that you do get a lot of money from
the tourists, I honestly think they would not mind the elephants."

Mumbeko, whose house was demolished, has his own solution: If tourists love
elephants so much, the government should fence them in.

"When I see one of those animals, I just know it wants to kill me."

robyn.dixon@latimes.com