How to predict seemingly unpredictable elephants

Don't know where or when? Then how can you stop them?

It is something that has fascinated millions over the years: that sense of intelligence and thought going on behind the eyes of our largest land animal. The problem is working out what they are thinking and therefore what they will do.

The predictable unpredictability of elephants

One thing is for sure - in almost all the research done so far on human elephant conflict, all the findings tend to indicate that no two areas or sets of elephants tend to behave in exactly the same way.

This makes prediction and prevention all the harder to promote across differing areas, and even within the same area. This is especially true for single male elephants.

Noah's research, which he conducted in Phase 1 of this project, was to work out where, how and what factors made elephants attack certain farms and not others.

What he found out was this:

Conflict could be accurately predicted on the basis of underlying geographical factors.
The effects of different types of conflict (crop raiding, human deaths and injuries) had different geographical distributions and different factors that you could use to predict their occurrence.
Occurrence of crop raiding by male elephants and family groups were both linked to the proximity of crops, whilst male elephants tended to appear closer to towns.
Using statistics and Noah's method of measuring, the intensity and probability of conflict in a particular area in the TransMara could be guessed at with at least a partial degree of accuracy.

Noah's TransMara statistics

A total of 329 crop-raiding incidents were recorded between March 1999 and August 2000. Crop raiding occurred exclusively during the hours of darkness from 1900 to 0500 hrs, with a peak at 2200 hrs.The size of crop raiding elephant groups ranged from 1-40 with 80% in groups of 10 animals or more. Only 2% of incidents involved lone male elephants. Individual males and male groups carried out 32% of incidents compared with 79% in Zimbabwe, while 68% were by family groups.

Elephants' night time highways

What is known is that elephants tend to have their own highways in the TransMara - routes through which they commonly pass to get from one place to another.

So if a farmer happens to build his house or plant his crops in the path of these living juggernauts, he should not be surprised to find the great gray beasts constantly in his fields.

Identifying the routes elephants habitually take can go a long way to predicting and therefore solving some human-elephant conflict situations.... that is if the farmer is willing to relocate his farm, which some are not.