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Asian elephants losing battle for living space
« on: Oct 15th, 2003, 11:20am » |
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Experts: Asian elephants losing battle for living space
Wednesday, October 15, 2003 Posted: 12:13 PM EDT (1613 GMT)
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Reuters) -- Asia can be a very crowded place, especially if you are an elephant.
The shrinking natural habitat of Asian elephants in recent decades has forced them into increased and often violent contact with humans, said environmentalists and wildlife experts who met recently in Colombo to find ways to tackle the problem.
In India alone, home to more than half the continent's estimated 35,000 pachyderms, about 200 wild elephants die every year in conflict with people or killed for ivory.
"Elephants are shot, snared, electrocuted, run into by trains, poisoned in retaliation and everywhere deprived of habitat," said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder and director of the Save the Elephants group.
Elephants are reduced to scavenging for food in such places as a stinking garbage dump in Mannampitiya, in Sri Lanka, an island that is home to about 3,000 elephants.
The dump is now an infamous elephant-watching spot.
Four people were killed in September in Bangladesh after a herd of 10 elephants descended from a forest southeast of Dhaka and stomped through villages, forcing troops to kill one of the animals.
Numbers pick up
Africa has about 600,000 elephants, belonging to a larger species whose numbers have grown after a worldwide ban on trade in ivory in 1989, resulting in overpopulation in some spots on the continent.
"The international ban on the trade of ivory successfully halted the decline in elephant numbers in Africa," said Douglas-Hamilton. He helped pioneer the tagging of elephants to track their movements, using neck collars with complex electronic equipment containing GPS trackers and motion detectors.
Before the ban, ivory hunters had cut Africa's elephant population in half.
Indian ecologist Shankar Raman said conservationists must do more research to accurately gauge the situation in Asia.
"We don't really know if the population is increasing or declining in India," Raman said.
"What we know is that the male population in many areas of Southern India is declining," he said.
"Normally, for each adult male you have two adult females. In some parts of South India it is now one adult male to 20 to 100 adult females. Males have been selectively poached for their tusks."
Illegal logging is also driving Asian elephants from the wild.
India, Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka have seen their forest cover dwindle in recent decades, while illegal logging is still rampant in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.
Leaving home
Elephants also leave their home ranges because of overpopulation, seasonal migration in search of food and the break-up of forests by roads and farms, Raman said.
Historically elephants have been used for work, lifting weights humans could not, and for war -- the Roman Emperor Claudius rode an elephant to invade Britain nearly 2,000 years ago.
Their magnificent bulk and surprising grace have also added to the panoply at ceremonies such as religious functions in Sri Lanka, although the island's government has banned their further domestication.
India, where the rich have a tradition of keeping elephants, has more than 2,000 beasts in captivity.
Experts from around 20 countries at the meeting discussed ways to keep apart humans and elephants, such as the installation of trip wires to alert people to the presence of the animals and radio-tracking devices.
Governments should establish clear policies on how to reduce conflict between elephants and humans, the experts said.
"A decision was taken that the United Nations will be asked to urge countries to do more to protect elephants," said Jayantha Jayewardene, a Sri Lankan elephant expert.
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