No.
Not THAT elephant nor the one which turned itself into a telephone.
Neither are in the room. The compass is not in the room either and
there’s palpable evidence that even the lotus bud has got displaced.
That’s if ‘people’ constitute ‘the room.’
These days, the
proverbial elephant in the room is the Coronavirus. The room is enormous
and constitutes almost the entire landmass of the earth or rather those
parts inhabited by humans. Today we are told that the virus is going to
hang in there for quite a while, vaccines notwithstanding. We are told
that we better resolve to live with the virus.
The elephant we
are talking about is a tad larger than the virus. We are talking about
the pachyderm, the behemoth, the elephant. Elephas maximus. And the room is the country or at least almost two-thirds of the territory.
I
am not an elephant expert. However, a recent paper titled ‘First
country-wide survey of the endangered Asian elephant: towards better
conservation and management in Sri Lanka’ written by people who have
studied the issue for a long time does shed some light. The article,
principally authored by Prithiviraj Fernando, breaks it down to numbers.
There are approximately 6,000 elephants in Sri Lanka and over
4,000 of them are likely to use areas where people also live. Elephants
roam in 59.9% of the island. Of the landmass a 44% slice is shared by
both species. Put another way, people are resident in 69.4% of the
elephant range. In other words, the ‘Human-Elephant Conflict Zone’
encompasses almost the entire Dry Zone of the country.
Given
this spatial distribution and the behavior of both species, we should
not be surprised at the outcome. There are fatalities on both sides. The
factor that precipitates an act of aggression can vary, but deep down
it is about both species wanting to survive. Individual humans and
individual elephants both share a will to live and a fear of death.
For
the last 61 years, the principal approach has been containment of
elephants to protected areas and driving those outside into the same, as
recommended by the Committee on Preservation of Wildlife appointed by
the then government. Initially, it was just elephant drives but it was
found that the creatures backtracked to their original locations, some
of them walking over 100 kms to what they consider to be their ‘home
range’. So, in the early 1990s, the authorities came up with the idea of
electric fences. It is reported that there are around 4,500 kms of
fencing at present. Studies have shown that herds thus driven do not
explore the protected terrain, but remain in comparatively small areas
in the direction of their home range. They typically overuse their
habitat and eventually face starvation.
Another problem with
this strategy is that the fences have been erected on the border of
territories that come under the Department of Wildlife Conservation
(DWC) and the Forest Department, following the basic strategy of holding
elephants in protected areas. So in effect there are elephants on
either side of these fences. Human encroachment on Forest Department
lands obviously invites conflict. The obvious solution is to move the
fences to the boundary that separates forest from human settlements.
That
however is only in places proximate to protected areas. As the above
data indicates, elephants roam far afield from what we are taught to
believe are their ‘habitat’ or the areas that humans have marked as
‘elephant land’ so to speak.
The solution has to take into
account the fact that the elephant is in the room. Right in the middle
of it. Right in your face or rather the face of the Dry Zone citizen. In
other words, the conflict occurs almost entirely outside protected
areas. For example, the study conducted by Fernando and his team
concludes that the conflict remains a serious issue even in areas such
as Polonnaruwa, Puttalam and Hamabantota where electric fencing of
protected area boundaries have been completed. The study details the
biological and ecological reasons including elephant behavior and
carrying capacity which contributed to the failure of this strategy.
The
study also points out that increasing the carrying capacity of
protected areas is not economically feasible. Apparently it costs around
Rs 2.4 million per year to increase the carrying capacity of a
protected area by a single elephant. Thus, it would cost close to a
billion rupees per year if we extrapolated to the approximately 4,000
elephants living in 'peopled' areas.
One of the human-centric
‘solutions’ proposed and implemented, if informally, has been to shoot
the elephants. It’s a simple argument: either you die or I die and I do
not wish to die.’ It’s not exactly ‘shoot on sight’ but people do
empathize with would-be victims shooting what are called ‘rogue
elephants.’ Yes, there are rogue elephants who attack and kill for
reasons that are not apparent to humans. And sometimes when it is not
possible to distinguish the rogue from the innocent you shoot anyway,
‘erring on the side of caution.’
Well, there are rogue humans
too and don’t we know about these! Just as the average human cannot
distinguish rogue, we can speculate, the elephant too has an
identification problem and could also ‘err on the side of caution.’
There
is another human-centric position that seeks a solution this side of
‘getting rid of the beast,’ you know, the kind of thing that many animal
lovers abhor perhaps because their lives are not at stake and who, in
their innocence, arrogance or outright ignorance, berate governments and
relevant departments for not doing enough to save our ‘gentle’ giants.
This position is one that takes into account ‘The elephant in the room,’
literally.
We need to take into account that elephants are not
naturally aggressive towards humans and it is typically their experience
with our species that make them belligerent. There are
problem-elephants but it is a problem that humans create in the main.
The fact that around 1,000 elephants have been killed between 2017 and
2019 indicate that removing the so-called ‘problem elephants’ is not a
sustainable solution.
What has worked is a strategy that goes
for coexistence. Living with the elephant, so to speak. No, it’s not
about elephants and humans being all lovey-dovey all of a sudden. We
live with snakes, we live with dogs who get infected with rabies. We
take precautions. We protect households and communities. What has worked
is community-fencing. They are eminently pragmatic given that
large-scale drives have not and cannot work.
Of course such a
strategy would have to be accompanied by awareness-creation campaigns,
protection of ‘protected areas’ — poaching, livestock grazing and
invasive plants remain serious issues that need to be addressed. Most of
all, there’s a need to get the facts right and peruse them with
sobriety.
The bottom line, of course, is that a sixty-year
strategy has not worked. Bad medicine will not work just by increasing
the dose. Mis-identification of the ailment will obviously lead to
erroneous prescription. There is an elephant in the room; not in the
rooms inhabited by humans who don’t have to worry about face-to-face
encounters with pachyderms but out there in almost the entire Dry Zone.
That elephant is not going to move.
malindasenevi@gmail.com
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