Elephants get a chilli reception
By Emma Duncan, WWF
It is well known that elephants are wary of bees, but fuming farmers tired
of having their crops flattened by visiting elephants are now turning to the hot
stuff - chilli - to keep them at bay.
Alfonso Namilepe surveys his field. The sugar cane stalks are flattened and
half-eaten crops lie all around. This was his only livelihood. In one night,
it's all gone.
"The armed conflict in Mozambique has finished, but now there's another
war," he says, looking as devastated as his field.
Over 1400km away in Kenya's Transmara district, farmers come down from a
rickety tree-top watch tower. They have worked in shifts through the night,
guarding their fields from a well-organized raid.
But the raiders aren't humans - they're elephants.
To many, elephants are a mythical symbol of power and wisdom. To rural
Africans, they can be a frightening reality.
The largest land mammal in the world, African elephants (Loxodonta africana)
once roamed across most of the African continent, from the Mediterranean coast
right down to the southern tip. Just 100 years ago, there may have been 5
million of them. Today there's no more than 500,000, living in fragmented
populations in sub-Saharan regions.
The ivory trade was a major factor behind the African elephant's decline. But
although poaching for meat and ivory is still a problem, the biggest threat to
their continued survival is loss of habitat.
"With the rapid growth in human populations over the past 30 years,
large areas of savannah and forest have been converted into agricultural
land," explains Dr Noah Sitati, an elephant expert working for the Durrell
Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) in Kenya. "This forces the
elephants into smaller and smaller areas."
This has led to increasing conflict between humans and elephants.
Kenya's Transmara district, located next to the world famous Masai Mara Game
Reserve, is one conflict hotspot. The traditional inhabitants of the region, the
nomadic, cattle-herding Maasai, have lived alongside elephants for centuries.
But over the last decade, large numbers of migrants have come to the area,
attracted by the good farming conditions. The new farms have replaced more than
half of the elephant's habitat. Many are right in the middle of established
elephant paths. And maize, a staple crop, is too much for elephants to resist.
"Elephants can smell ripe maize from a distance of 10km," says
Sitati. "They send a few ahead to see if the maize is ready before the full
herd advances - making a beeline for tall ripe cobs. At harvest time they can
easily trample and eat an entire year's crop in one night."
Crop raiding is the most common type of human-elephant conflict, occurring
throughout Africa wherever elephants and farmers live near one another. The
animals can also disrupt daily life. Children in the Transmara are often too
frightened to walk to and from school, or have to leave school early because
elephants are in the area. As a result, many children's education has suffered.
Sometimes the conflict ends in tragedy.
"Elephants have killed 200 people in Kenya and injured many more over
the past seven years," says Dr PJ Stephenson from WWF's African Elephant
Programme. "And northern Mozambique - where elephants destroy up to
two-thirds of crops each year - lions, hyenas, and other predators have learned
that a farmer guarding his field at night is easy prey. In one year, there were
52 hyena attacks in one small district, resulting in 28 deaths."
Elephants too are often killed. In Kenya, wildlife authorities shoot between
50 and 120 elephants each year in response to the animals harming people or
their livelihoods. Some villages take the law in to their own hands and kill
many more animals. The situation is the same wherever elephants come in to
conflict with people.
Because the scale of the problem has only recently become so large, solutions
have only just started being developed. One problem is that elephants are not
just big, but smart - they can knock down regular fences, and figure out how to
disable electric fences. They also quickly become habituated to loud noises made
by farmers defending their fields.
Bring on the chilli
But it seems they have one weak spot - they don't like spicy food.
Chilli was shown to be an effective elephant deterrent in Zimbabwe in 2000.
It's either grown around crops that elephants like to eat, used with engine oil
to paint fiery rope barriers around fields, or burnt with elephant dung to
produce a pungent smoke.
"It's a simple and effective solution, but it sometimes requires
patience," says Peter Bechtel, who is working with WWF in Mozambique's
Quirimbas National Park to help communities cope with elephants.
"For example, elephants were drinking at a water hole near one village
every night and damaging fields on the way in and out. The community set up
oiled ropes around the water hole. For three nights the smell of the chilli kept
the elephants away, but the next night they broke the ropes and drank. The ropes
were repaired but the elephants broke them again later. The village was about to
give up ... but the elephants never came back. Twice was enough!"
In another village, a farmer decided to use chilli bombs to defend his
cabbage patch, which elephants had destroyed before.
"When he heard the elephants approaching through the forest, the farmer
burnt chilli bombs in four locations around his fields," says Bechtel.
"The bull elephant came in first and encountered the smoke. He snorted and
shook his head, then turned and ran off. The others followed, and all stayed
away from the entire village for five weeks."
This had positive repercussions for the whole village. With no elephants
around, mangoes were harvested for the first time in 10 years.
To further improve crop protection, WWF is advising villagers to plant their
fields next to each other in blocks outside the forest to make them easier to
defend. After receiving training, most villages have set up committees to
oversee the crop protection work. They've also started growing chilli so they
don't have to rely on project support.
A combination of chilli ropes and watchtowers has also proved very effective
in Kenya's Transmara district.
"The watchtowers provide an 'early warning detection system',"
explains Sitati. "If the farmers see or hear elephants approaching, they
can usually scare them off using bright lights and noise. The chilli ropes form
a second line of defence. We need to keep rotating our tactics, otherwise the
elephants eventually learn to get around them."
WWF and DICE are also recommending that
farmers grow crops that elephants don't like instead of maize, such as chilli
and chrysanthemum, from which the natural insecticide pyrethrum is produced.
Alternative income projects are also being promoted, such as honey production
from the rich forests. The Maasai hope to develop tourism in the area too.
Changes to village planning could help as well. WWF's analysis revealed that
many of those injured or killed by elephants in the Transmara district might
have been filled with false courage or else slow to react - about one-third of
the attacks occurred after the victims had left a bar situated near the maize
fields. An easy if unpopular solution: close bars that are near fields.
Thanks to these combined measures, human-elephant conflict has been markedly
reduced in Mozambique's Quirimbas National Park and Kenya's Transmara district.
WWF plans to extend the work to other communities throughout Africa.
"The most important aspect of this work is that it helps local people
deal with their every day problems," says Stephenson. "The success in
reducing crop-raiding and increasing crop yields has made people more
enthusiastic and supportive of conservation, and has demonstrated that people
can live alongside wildlife while developing sustainable livelihoods. And that
in turn should help ensure a long future for the elephants!"
It seems the hottest ideas really are the simplest.
More information:
WWF - www.panda.org
* Emma Duncan is Managing Editor at WWF International.
Reproduced with permission from WWF. © 2002 WWF-- World Wide Fund For
Nature. (Formerly World Wildlife Fund). All rights reserved.
Useful links:
Addo Elephant Park, South Africa. www.addoelephantpark.com
Conserving Addo's elephants - the past, present and future of the population. More.
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