Hungry Elephants Bedevil Indonesians

Michael Priyono got onto the tame elephant just after midnight and chased two of its wild cousins through the dense Sumatran jungle. Twenty miles later, the 37-year-old Indonesian government worker gave up.

“We’ll chase them again tomorrow,” he said.

Priyono, who heads a program to save elephants in the area, had hoped to capture the beasts after they strayed into a coconut plantation and return them to a government reserve.

Indonesia protects its elephants and has set aside large jungle areas for them. But a shortage of food is driving them onto agricultural land, where they compete with man for space.

Most of Indonesia’s 5,000 elephants are on the huge eastern island of Sumatra. At least 600 live in the southern part of the island, and many have been foraging in plantations at night, knocking over coconut trees in search of the sweet sap inside.

By dawn, hundreds of trees lie strewn across the ground.

“This is just like a restaurant for them. It’s frustrating to see day after day,” said Ramon Arsajaya, project executive of PT Multi Agro Corp., which operates a private 24,700-acre coconut and cassava plantation.

Arsajaya said elephants leveled at least 250 acres of coconut palms in just two months at his plantation. He said the trees would be replanted but would take more than two years to produce coconuts.

Settlers in areas frequented by migrating elephants say most of their crops have been destroyed and at least one person killed by elephants in the last year.

Getting the animals out of cultivated areas and back to reserves is not easy.

“Chasing them away is a very dangerous job. When those elephants get angry, they chase back,” Arsajaya said.

“Actually, they have no instinct to kill,” Priyono said, “but if they are in shock or desperate, anything could be destroyed, even a bulldozer.”

His team from the government’s elephant domestication center started work last November in the Gunung Batin area, where Multi Agro and three other private plantations have had elephant problems.

The team tries to capture young elephants, which are easier to train, and take them to the domestication center in Way Kambas, 45 miles away. The older animals are returned to the reserves.

“But this will only solve half the problem. The real problem is how to make sure those elephants never come back again,” one conservationist said.

South Sumatra’s jungles are big enough to hold more than double the actual number of elephants, but there is not always enough food.

“Expanding and improving their habitat is a matter of funds. We haven’t got that,” he said.

Training the captured elephants is as arduous as managing the wild ones.

“We need at least four people to tame even a very young elephant,” said Samak Sanchai, a Thai instructor who helped Indonesia’s Forestry Ministry start the Way Kambas center in 1985.

Using chains and rattan to tie the elephants’ legs and a small, sharp-tipped ganco hammer to sting them, instructors first teach the elephants to lift their legs, walk at a controlled pace and salute humans.

Then the schooling becomes more complicated.

“We train the elephants according to the needs of the school and sometimes according to their own talent,” Sanchai said.

Like a boarding school, Way Kambas works to a strict routine. At 8 a.m. the elephants are roused for an hour of training, then let loose in the reserve to look for lunch.

They rarely stray far and at 3 p.m. are back for their hourlong afternoon session. Bath time follows, when the pachyderms group together for a companionable rest.

Way Kambas, on the edge of a 320-acre sanctuary, is home to 38 elephants at a time. After six months, some are bought by zoos, which pay about $4,200 for an educated elephant.