The Elephant in the Room: Promoting Pathways for Human-Elephant Coexistence
At the core of our existences, humans and elephants have a lot in common. We have the same basic needs, including food, water, shelter, and oxygen. We both have complex social lives and family structures; we love, protect, and nurture family members and pass along the knowledge and skills necessary for survival to our offspring. Considering all of our similarities, it may be hard to imagine how these two species could ever be at odds. This unfortunately is not the case. Human-elephant conflict is on the rise and the survival of both species is dependent on finding pathways for human-elephant coexistence.
During my undergraduate environmental science studies, I travelled to Botswana to participate in research efforts to study out how global warming and extreme weather events, like floods and droughts, influence the growth and abundance of grasses and woody plants that animals depend on for survival. We lived in tents all over Botswana on the outskirts of protected areas and wildlife reserves in constant contact with some of the most abundant wildlife populations on Earth, all the while listening to the voices of the local farmers, conservation activists, trophy hunters, and government officials we met along the way.
The first night that I was awoken by the sound of nearby gunshots, I was terrified. We were camping on the outskirts of Moremi Wildlife Reserve on a local resident’s property at the time, so I assumed I had just heard the climax of a poaching event. The next morning, our host explained that he had to fire gunshots to scare away a herd of elephants that had crossed the property fence. The chilli-soaked cloths and rattling cans hung along the fence were not enough to stop them, so our host was alerted by motion detectors on the inside of the fence. As my trip progressed, I noticed how frequent these types of encounters were and realized that the complexity of human-wildlife interactions goes much deeper than I had previously thought. I sought to learn more.
The Elephants
Southern Africa is home to the largest number of elephants on the continent, with recent population estimates of 293,447 elephants in 2016. Nearly 75% of the elephants in southern Africa exist as a single population in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA). The KAZA TFCA is the world’s largest transboundary conservation area, encompassing almost 201,000 square miles across Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Within southern Africa, Botswana has the largest elephant population of any country, almost 132,000 elephants.
Elephants are ecosystem engineers, meaning they play an essential role in maintaining natural ecosystems. As herds of elephants travel over rangelands, they trample dense vegetation to make spaces for smaller species to exist and they disperse seeds in their dung which helps generate new vegetation growth. Elephants also dig into dry riverbeds when water is low which creates water holes that can be used by other animals. Elephants are also of vital economic importance, attracting the marvel of tourists from all over the world. In ecotourism alone, elephants are each worth an estimated $1.6 million. Habitat fragmentation due to urban and agricultural expansion, combined with ivory poaching, increased human-elephant conflict, unsustainable bushmeat harvesting, and climate change increasingly threaten the survival of elephants in the region.
The People
Of particular interest to elephants is the eastern panhandle of Botswana’s Okavango Delta. In this area, roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park, more than 15,000 elephants compete with 15,000 people for access to resources. The region is culturally diverse, including the Bahambukushu, Bayei, and Basarwa. Even though they speak different languages and follow different traditions, they share the day-to-day struggles of protecting their homes and fields while living in an elephant landscape.
Here, elephants roam freely across the landscape, following migratory corridors that have been remembered and passed down by matriarch elephants for generations. As seasonal waters further north dry up, elephants move south to the permanent waters and food sources of the Okavango Delta. This often means that elephants come into areas where people now are living, growing crops, herding livestock, and walking to school.
For three months each year during crop harvest time, many families are driven from the safety of their villages to set up camp along their fields of sorghum, millet, and watermelons. Armed with aluminum drums and rifles, farmers in the eastern panhandle of Botswana’s Okavango Delta patrol their fields, guarded with chili-soaked cloths, cans, and fire, wondering if these measures will be enough to protect their crops from the elephant herds.
As elephants travel through fields, they trample and raid crops. A single elephant can destroy an entire field in one night, and a herd can do it even faster. In the villages of the eastern Okavango panhandle, the average income is less than US$60 a month. Most families rely on rain-fed subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods, thus the loss of a harvest means that families have nothing to eat and no money to purchase other necessities.
The Problem
As human and elephant populations continue to expand, humans and elephants are increasingly coming into contact with one another, particularly in rural communities living on the outskirts of protected areas. Resource scarcity and unreliable water availability due to climate change are threatening both species ability to meet their basic needs. A mass die-off of 330 elephants in Botswana in 2020 has been linked to toxic cyanobacteria blooms resulting from unprecedented environmental conditions. As if climate change wasn’t threatening enough, local perceptions of elephants are deteriorating as the risk of food insecurity increases. Studies have reported a rise in the number of poaching incidents in recent years, prompting government action through the approval of a National Anti-Poaching Strategy, including provisions for implementing a shoot-to-kill policy for persons suspected of poaching.
Each year, approximately 25 elephants and 1 person die as the direct result of human-elephant conflict. Decision makers are faced with an existential crisis.
The Solutions
The biggest challenge faced by decision makers is finding a solution that balances the viewpoints of all stakeholders. Many human-elephant conflict mitigation strategies are already in practice — acoustic deterrents, light-based deterrents, agriculture-based deterrents, and early detection and warning — but come at the financial and psychosocial expense of farmers.
Many rural farmers in the eastern Okavango panhandle are frustrated by existing government compensation programs that cover crop-damage by elephants. They say the compensation is slow to arrive and it’s just not enough. Instead, many feel that the narrative should shift away from mitigating conflict, and instead adopt a preemptive approach to support humans and elephants living in the same landscape.
Others have supported the recent reversal of the elephant trophy hunting ban in Botswana. Many hunters will argue that trophy hunting is the most effective conservation strategy because it reduces the number of problem animals and results in benefits such as meat, revenue, and jobs for the local community, ultimately keeping locals from turning against wildlife. However, skeptics are repulsed by the sanctioned butchering of such intelligent animals and claim that trophy hunting is unsustainable and subject to corruption and unequal financial distribution. Many scientists and conservationists would also argue that generalizations about trophy hunting should be avoided, and more research is needed to examine these policies on a case-by-case basis.
Nonprofit organizations like the Ecoexist Project work on the ground to provide research-based answers to these unresolved questions. The mission of Ecoexist is to “support the lives and livelihoods of people who share space with elephants while considering the needs of elephants and their habitats.” In the World Wildlife magazine, journalist Diane Tipping-Woods explains that the co-founders of Ecoexist, ecologist Graham McCulloch, biologist Anna Songhurst, and anthropologist Amanda Stronza, work to give the community a voice by “engaging in dialogue with local communities about elephant conflicts, facilitating their participation in land-use planning, and encouraging agricultural practices that help farmers produce better yields off less land and harvest crops earlier, to avoid conflict with elephants.”
Finding permanent strategies for coexistence will be no easy task and will require a data-driven approach with an emphasis on community involvement. Through the collaboration of local, national, and international groups, I am optimistic that we will live to see a day of human-elephant coexistence.
Works Cited:
Gichohi, N. (2018, August 10). Elephants are the pillars of Africa’s ecosystems and they need our support. Retrieved March 08, 2021, from https://www.awf.org/blog/elephants-are-pillars-africas-ecosystems-and-they-need-our-support#:~:text=As%20the%20largest%20of%20all,riverbeds%20when%20rainfall%20is%20low.
Harvey, R. (2020, April 13). Elephant hunts for sale during a pandemic. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://therevelator.org/elephant-hunts-pandemic/
Hughes, R. (2015). “The Ecoexist Project: Pathways to coexistence”. Retrieved February 07, 2021, from https://vimeo.com/124473058
Nuwer, R. (2017, December 04). Hunt elephants to save them? Some countries see no other choice. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/science/elephants-lions-africa-hunting.html
Tipping–Woods, D. (2018). Living with elephants in Botswana. World Wildlife, (Winter 2018). https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/winter-2018/articles/living-with-elephants-in-botswana--2
The ecoexist project. (n.d.). Retrieved February 07, 2021, from http://www.ecoexistproject.org/
Thouless, C. R. (2016). African elephant status report 2016: An update from the African elephant database. Gland: IUCN.
Shaffer, L. J., Khadka, K. K., Van Den Hoek, J., & Naithani, K. J. (2019). Human-elephant conflict: A review of current management strategies and future directions. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 6. doi:10.3389/fevo.2018.00235
