The Human-Elephant Relationship
Exploring options, challenges and experiments between
Conflict and Coexistence
Beyond the Fortress
If we can do it with elephants, we can do it with everyone
India has more than two-thirds of the world’s wild Asian elephants. They live alongside over a billion people. In the Gudalur region alone, around 150 elephants move through 580 square kilometres of land shared with a quarter of a million people.
Elephants have always lived alongside people and always will. The question is not how to remove them from human landscapes — that is neither possible nor desirable — but how to honestly balance the needs of people and elephants everywhere, while acknowledging the very real and sometimes severe impacts elephants have on people’s lives.
What makes this possible — and what we are working to sustain — is a deep cultural and emotional relationship between people and elephants in this part of the world. Elephants are loved, talked about, woven into local life in ways that go far beyond simply sharing space. Despite the damage they cause, people have historically tolerated them. That tolerance is the foundation of everything.
The elephant is the ultimate test case for human-nature coexistence. If we can figure out how to share space with the world’s largest land mammal, coexisting with everyone else should be a little more imaginable.
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?
Not all elephants are a problem. A small number of elephants cause the vast majority of conflict. If you know who they are and how they behave, you can manage things very differently. We’ve built an app that lets field staff photograph and upload elephant sightings, building a behavioural profile and history for each individual. JumboRadar is currently in use across Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, Assam, eastern Nepal and Bhutan.
Landscape mapping
We are mapping land use outside protected areas to understand what pulls elephants into croplands — from the elephant’s point of view. Where crops are unpalatable (tea, coffee) and don’t threaten rural livelihoods, coexistence may be entirely feasible. Where a single night’s raid destroys a poor farmer’s annual income, the calculus is completely different.
Barriers will always be part of coexistence in some landscapes. We are comparing four types — nylon lashing belts (shipping-grade, rated to 10 tons of force), steel rope fences, electric fences, and beehive fences — watching how different individual elephants interact with each, and how they perform over time.