Moat to Keep Elephants Away From Farms

For centuries, southern Indians dug pits to trap elephants and kill them for their ivory or train them for work in Hindu temples, wars or timber-hauling.

Now conservationists are taking up spades. Not to trap the endangered beasts, but to save them from man, whose farms border the lush teak and bamboo forests in southern India that are among the last homes of Asian elephants.

Researchers hope their planned pit--actually, a 110-mile-long dry moat that is 6 1/2 feet deep and 10 feet across--will keep elephants away from crops that farmers will kill to protect.

The war with farmers has only added to the elephant’s woes, depleting numbers already decimated by ivory poachers. The most notorious of southern India’s poachers, Veerappan, still kills elephants and has evaded several huge military-style police searches in the last decade.

India is home to half the remaining 60,000 Asian elephants, a species that once roamed in the millions from the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East all the way across Asia to China. Now the wild population inhabits areas totaling just 168,000 square miles, scarcely larger than California.

Arun Venkataraman, of the elephant research unit of the Indian Institute of Sciences, said at least 14 elephants have been killed by farmers since March 1996 near Bangalore. Half a dozen wildlife reserves are located near Bangalore, sheltering elephants as well as tigers and other endangered animals.

Farmers are more worried for their crops than the survival of elephants.

One bull elephant wandering from a reserve can consume up to 165 pounds of finger millet in one night. A study of 10 villages found that elephants ate or destroyed 220,000 pounds of millet, corn, paddy, banana and coconuts in one season across 8,000 acres.

Once elephants discover good farmland, herds keep coming back for more during the ripening season, even if their home grounds are hundreds of miles away.

“It’s not a fairy tale that elephants have good memory,” Venkataraman said.

To protect their livelihood, especially expensive crops like coffee, some farmers use guns. Others fashion fatal traps that work on their own--one dangled a wire into a ripe bunch of bananas and threw the other end across a high-tension power line. An elephant reaching for a banana was electrocuted.

“Often the entire village denies knowledge of how the elephants died, but we can tell because the trunks carry a burn mark of electrocution,” Venkataraman said.

S.N. Rajagopal, deputy conservator of forests, added: “The fight is leading to a conflict between park managements and the local farmers.”

In hopes of defusing confrontations, game wardens began digging the moat late last year at the Bandipur reserve near Bangalore, which has nearly 2,000 elephants, Rajagopal said. If it works, trenches will be dug at other reserves.

So far, officials have dug about 30 miles of trench in the 320-square-mile Bandipur park. No firm date had been set for completing the project.

The trench is the latest containment idea after the failure of electric fences that were designed to stun elephants and keep them from wandering. The fences were never maintained by local officials and batteries used to electrify the wire were not charged regularly or replaced on time.

India set up wildlife reserves in the mid-1970s. But game wardens here have a tougher time protecting wildlife than in many countries.

India’s reserves are mostly in the south and the remote northeast, where indigenous tribal communities are often allowed to live inside and use forest produce. Residents freely herd in their cattle for grazing and, along with organized timber merchants, take away wood for building homes and lighting hearths.