The Human-Elephant Relationship

Exploring options, challenges and experiments between
Conflict and Coexistence

Beyond the Fortress

Challenging the Myth of
Human-Free Nature Conservation

Nature conservation has traditionally relied on the creation of large human-free ‘protected’ (from people) areas – PAs.

This has, of course, been relatively successful but has its own set of problems. The first is that this model originated in North America, a continent that had vast human-free areas because the Native Americans were decimated by the arriving settlers, leaving the land largely depopulated.

In a crowded country like India, there are no such human-free areas. Our ‘PA Network’ (though a very spread-out ‘PA Archipelago’ is perhaps a better description) covers about 5% of the landmass and has hundreds of thousands of people living in it.

Many of them are being relocated, but even if they all are moved out, large and dangerous wild animals currently live in at least 30% of the country’s area – sharing space with people in another 25% of the country.

The Ethos of
Cultural 'Tolerance'

Leveraging India’s Unique Human-Wildlife Relationship for Modern Conservation

India also has a rather unique track record in terms of the human-wildlife relationship. As every race ‘developed’, they invariably killed off all the other large mammals that competed with them for space and resources. Wolves in North America and Europe are well-known examples – even Japan killed off all its wolves around 1900.

India has arguably had the technology to wipe out most animals for centuries, but more than half of the world's tigers and two-thirds of the world's Asian elephants continue to live alongside people, themselves packed in at about 450 in every square kilometre.

Should the Indian conservation ethos build on this long religious and cultural ‘tolerance’ of wildlife, or should we completely ignore it and copy everyone else in the world?

Mapping a Shared Future

In the Gudalur region, highly dominated by people, we are looking for ways in which people and elephants can share space. This is more easily said than done – ‘human-elephant conflict’ is all over the news every day, with over 30 people being killed in this area alone over the last 5 years.

There is no ‘coexistence’ blueprint/formula or solution, so most of our work at this stage is ‘research’ – to better understand how elephants (and other animals) and people are living together in a place like the Gudalur Forest Division and try to make sure they can continue to coexist in the years to come. In more concrete terms, some of the activities we are working on are:

Understanding different Narratives

Talking/interviewing people across the region to understand conflict and tolerance towards animals; how they managed to live alongside each other in the past; and to see if any of this can be relevant in a more ‘modern’ context.

Framework for coexistence

Helping local villages and large estates understand how elephants move around/in their lands and make ‘human-elephant coexistence plans’, possibly by cordoning off some areas while also allowing elephants to move through others.

Monitoring Movement

Setting up camera traps to let local people see (and hopefully get excited by) animals on their lands and be more tolerant of them. We’ve got four camera traps, and they are being used in various estates at the moment.

Guiding Movement

Working with local panchayats, forest and revenue departments to coordinate efforts on issues of human-wildlife interactions.

Mapping interactions

Making lots of maps – where people get injured or killed, where elephants come regularly, how they move through the landscape, where the concentration of houses is, etc. This is being used to look for broad scale patterns/trends to see if anything can be done at that district level.

Profiling Individual Elephant

Photographing and identifying individual elephants to understand how different individuals behave.