Human-wildlife conflict is a major concern for wildlife conservation around the world. It can take a variety of forms. Depredation is one form of conflict, whether it be wolves eating farmed sheep or birds filling up on fish at a hatchery. There are also public safety threats from mobile species causing car collisions or predatory species attacking people.
During a field course in college, I studied human-elephant conflict around Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya. Amboseli sits in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. The park is breathtaking. It’s also particularly famous for its elephants.
Image by Lindsay Martinez
The elephants do not just live in the park though. They also venture outside its boundaries and onto the lands of local people. That’s where elephants get into trouble. Farming has expanded around the park, and some of the elephants have a fondness for tasting corn and other crops grown by farmers. “Crop raiding” elephants venture onto farms and can devour an entire planted field in a single night. This can destroy a farmer’s livelihood.
Image by Lindsay Martinez
In Kenya, the major conservation threat to elephants used to be poaching. Elephants are illegally hunted to harvest the ivory from their tusks. That ivory is later traded across countries and crafted into trinkets. The illegal trade in wildlife parts for food, medicines, or crafts has impacted a huge variety of species.
Luckily for Kenyan elephants, in the early 2010s, conservationists led campaigns like “Hands Off Our Elephants” that helped get elephant poaching under control. Although poaching has been addressed, the rise of farming around elephant-rich Amboseli National Park has led to human-elephant conflict. The conflicts result in killings or attacks on problem-causing elephants. They also cause local people to have a growing intolerance for elephants.
Image by Lindsay Martinez
During my course experience, we visited farms and listened to people from both the local community and conservation groups to learn about human-elephant conflict. We learned that farming has the possibility to be very lucrative, but it’s also risky and scary because elephants could destroy everything.
Farmers explained that while foreign tourists enjoy seeing elephants, they do not have to deal with any of the problems that elephants cause. Farmers do. Meanwhile, the local people who are negatively impacted by elephants do not always get in on the economic benefits of elephant tourism.
We learned that it is not easy to prevent crop-raiding. It’s generally effective but overly expensive to put electric fences around farms to keep the elephants out. Various tricks like beehives, loud noises, or irritating smells can deter elephants from visiting farms. However, elephants are smart. They can find their way around a lot of deterrents.
At the end of the day, it seemed like there was no guarantee conservationists could keep elephants out of farms to protect both the farmers and the elephants themselves. Human-wildlife conflicts, like those around Amboseli, are not easy fixes. It takes creative ideas with solid financial support to solve these issues.
Meanwhile, people are always expanding the range of where they live, work, and explore. Around the world, we must find a way to live alongside wildlife while avoiding or at least tolerating conflicts with species. Working on human-wildlife conflict is essential to the future of wildlife conservation and human well-being.
