Ways to stop elephants
11 potential ways to stop an elephant coming onto your patch
Guarding fields and crops
Guarding fields is probably the most common way to try and stop elephants entering your fields.
Creating a disturbance
The use of noise and light to scare elephants away are very popular short-term mitigation strategies. Common among these are beating drums, barrels and tins, lighting fires, using torches and throwing sticks and stones. Trained personnel (such as the KWS) also use thunder flashes and blank or live bullets to scare away elephants.These methods are quick and cheap to implement and many can be implemented by communities themselves without training or specialised equipment. However, they have met with limited success. Elephants often become habituated to such methods over time, and may even become aggressive and dangerous in response to disturbance. Moreover, these methods usually only serve to displace the problem to adjacent, less well protected areas.
Land use planning and Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM)
Human elephant conflict exists where agriculture and human populations encroach on elephant range. A clear solution, then, is to move away from agriculture to more compatible forms of land use within elephant ranges. Wildlife-related land use options, such as tourism and hunting, could also provide direct benefits for local communities whilst conserving biodiversity.
Chemical repellents
A good chemical deterrent may be chili essence, which can be added to fires to serve as an irritant to the elephants. It has also been added to grease and smeared on string fences.
An adaptation of this methods uses a capsicum aerosol spray directed at elephants. Although the delivery technology remains problematic and the method is to an extent wind dependent, it has proved effective over the short term in trials in Zimbabwe (find out about the Elephant Pepper Conservation Project)
Killing elephants
Destruction of problem elephants has been used mainly to appease local communities affected by HEC, and to provide some indirect compensation in the form of meat. Currently Kenya destroys between 50 to 120 problem elephants each year because of conflicts arising with humans.However, shooting persistent problem elephants seems to have little effect on HEC This is partly because identifying the persistent offender can be very difficult, particularly when centralised decision-making results in huge delays between reporting of HEC incidents and subsequent activity.
What is more, shooting problem animals seems to have no deterrent effect on other elephants in the area. Furthermore, after the removal of problem animals, other elephants usually take their place as crop raiders. However, unpalatable as it sounds, if controlled shooting is restricted to the peak conflict periods it, unfortunately, may be a more effective deterrent since it is more likely to induce association between killing and crop raiding in the mind of the elephants.
Translocation of elephants
Translocation of elephants has received much publicity in recent years, and is popular amongst conservation organisations and donors because it is non-fatal. However, translocation is equally unlikely to be a cure as killing, for similar reasons as given above. It also remains a difficult and expensive process, requiring huge financial resources and skilled personnel and may only serve to displace the problem to another area.
Have a smaller farm
Small farms appeared easier to protect in conflict zones Equally, in TransMara, where the project profiled on this web site is located, elephants were more easily detected and deterred from small farms, whereas they could enter larger farms and remain undetected more easily. This is probably a result of declining patrol effort per unit area on larger farms that have larger perimeters across which elephants may enter.
Use alternative cropping and harvesting regimes
Alternative cropping of species that elephants are less likely to raid had been suggested as a possible means of reducing HEC. However, elephants have been shown to take a wide variety of available crops within an area. These have included maize, bananas, cashew nuts, pumpkins, sugar cane, cabbages, carrots, onions, pineapple, millet, sorghum, cassava, yams, plantain, manioc and cotton.
Whilst some crops are more favoured, reports of crops being avoided are rare, although in Ghana coca was seldom eaten by elephants. As such it may be difficult to find alternative crops that elephants will not eat. Moreover, in a predominantly subsistence economy in agriculturally sub-optimal areas it may be difficult to get farmers to alter their cropping regimes away from tried and tested staples such as maize and millet.
Another tactic is that some farmers have resorted to harvesting early (before the elephants literally get wind (smell) of a maturing crop. However, this reduces the quality and hence value of the harvest, so may not offset the costs of crop raiding.
Changing Farm location
Taking into account elephant movement patterns when situating farms may reduce the chance of conflict. In some areas elephants adhere to identifiable routes. However, experience in TransMara shows that such routes may exist, but information supporting this is not yet conclusive.
Abandoning farms
This is a last resort for farmers for dealing with problem elephants when all other mitigation methods have failed. In TransMara a large number of farms have already been abandoned due to persistent problems.
The fact that such action is taken is indicative of the long-term failure of many of the direct mitigation methods, and of the persistence of conflict in areas where agriculture and elephants coincide. It suggests that the only feasible long term solution is appropriate land use planning whereby either only elephant-compatible human activities are developed in elephant ranges, or else elephants are excluded from agricultural areas within their range.
Compensation schemes
Across Africa, countries have attempted to solve the problem of human elephant conflict by offering financial compensation to farmers for crop damage and other losses. However, these schemes have mostly been ill-conceived, easily corrupted and unsustainable. (Read more on this)With sincere thanks to the Human-Elephant Conflict Working Group for the source of this information.
