Covered:
- Land conflict
- Human and Elephant death
Another conservation issue and possible resultant effect from loss and fragmentation of habitat is the issue of land conflict with humans. Particularly, the destruction and raiding of crops of farmers by the elephants. This poses as a huge problem not only for large scale agricultural industries, but for for poor farmers being forced to use land inhabited by elephants as they can lose their mean of earning just from elephant raids (WWF, n.d.). One example is the loss of about $105m USD/year in oil palm plantations and timber in Riau, Indonesia, from elephant damaging the area.
What concerns us, is the involvement of death in both elephants and humans. It was reported than the deaths of humans caused by elephants is greater in Asia than in Africa (Sukumar, 2006) and this fact is pretty alarming! In India alone, more than 100 people are being killed per year (WWF, n.d.)!
Elephants are not spared despite their overwhelming strength and size compared to humans. Well, humans are intelligent and use technology to annihilate or kill something anyway right?
Because of this land conflict, elephants are often killed as “punishment” or as a “solution”. An example closer to home, Indonesia, is dozens of elephants are being poisoned each year especially in agricultural sites (WWF, n.d.).