Elephants, humans die as hostility soars
http://www.iol.co.za/

July 31 2012 at 06:00pm
By JAMES CLARKE

Cape Town - Ten days ago, 200 Maasai “warriors”, in an act of vengeance,
randomly speared a dozen elephants, 10 buffalo and a lion from Kenya’s
Amboseli National Park – East Africa’s second most popular reserve.

They complained they received too little spin-off from the park, yet had to
put up with elephants damaging their crops and taking lives.

A month before, six lions from Nairobi National Park were speared to death
by disgruntled locals.

The raids echoed the recent assault on one of SA’s most attractive
reserves – Ndumo in KZN – when angry farmers destroyed the fence and moved
in with their livestock and ploughs.

African communities are becoming fed-up with wildlife – elephants in
particular. And elephants are showing increasing signs of being fed-up with
humans.

Specialists in animal behaviour believe that after years of being abused and
of being more and more constricted, translocated and poached, elephants are
hitting back.

African and Asian elephants are killing about 500 people a year, according
to Brian Handwerk of National Geographic. He says it’s because they are
being pushed into smaller and smaller pockets “and increasingly they are
pushing back”.

From SA to the Sudan there have been so many fatal conflicts between
elephants and people as well as crop damage that scientists have set up a
Human Elephant Conflict programme as part of a worldwide Human Wildlife
Conflict initiative backed by the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN).

A paper – Human-wildlife Conflict in Africa, published by the Food and
Agricultural Organisation in Rome – reported that the antipathy among rural
Africans towards elephants “goes beyond that expressed for any other
wildlife”.

It said people living in central Africa “fear and detest” elephants; that
farmers in Zimbabwe display “ingrained hostility” towards them. “(They) are
the focus of all local animosity toward wildlife.”

There’s evidence that today’s elephants are suffering from chronic stress
brought about by prolonged habitat reduction, ceaseless poaching, culling
and mass translocations. People who have had experience with these
intelligent creatures know that elephants, like whales and dolphins, are
sociable animals with strong family bonds and have an ultra long-range
communication system outside of human hearing. As a result, dealing with the
elephant overpopulation in parts of southern Africa is proving to be
extremely complex.

Dr Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist and ecologist at Oregon State University who
is involved in their environmental sciences programme concerned with Human
Elephant Conflict, says: “Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship
between elephants and people has dramatically changed.

“What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and
elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility
and violence.”

Bradshaw and her colleagues, in a 2005 article in the science journal Nature
titled Elephant Breakdown, say elephants are displaying increased animosity.

Human Elephant Conflict threatens the future of Africa’s game reserves.
Unless rural people who live among wild and dangerous animals derive
tangible benefits from their situation – and soon – they will continue to
support poaching. Most non-government wildlife organisations are blissfully
unaware of the seriousness of the human-wildlife conflict.

Eighty percent of Africa’s wildlife lives outside protected areas, yet those
who live among them have no say in their management and receive little or no
benefit from the tourism that Africa’s wildlife brings.

Elephants are behaving in a way never before encountered because, says
Bradshaw, “stress has so disrupted the intricate web of familial and
societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised
in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what
we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of
elephant culture”.

She says they are showing signs of a societal breakdown.

It appears we are driving elephants mad.

In many regions of Africa there is an increasing human toll caused by
elephants as well as increasing crop damage. There is also an increasing
toll of elephants themselves – mostly by Far Eastern ivory smugglers who
fund African poachers and bribe government officials and ministers.

The IUCN says an average of 104 elephants are killed daily in Africa – close
to 38 000 a year. Recognising the increased tensions between elephants and
humans, it has launched a worldwide project to hopefully alleviate some of
the suffering – on both sides.

Human Elephant Conflict poses serious challenges to wildlife managers, local
communities, conservationists worldwide and to the IUCN’s African Elephant
Specialist Group and its Asian counterpart.

Between 1900 and 1984 Africa’s elephant population was reduced by 93 percent
and is now found in only 5 percent of the continent. Its numbers have fallen
from 1.3 million in the early 1970s to about 450 000 today. This recent
sharp decline in numbers has mainly been due to poaching.

Wildlife because of “eco-tourism” – viewing wildlife, wilderness trails,
wildlife photography and hunting – is in parts of rural Africa the only
“cash crop”. Properly managed, it is a self-sustaining high-employment
industry – and the African elephant is its star attraction. - Weekend Argus

I have been reading a book that really covers this. "Game Changer" by Glen Martin.