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New holding ground for rogue elephants needs careful watch
View(s):The Horowpataha Elephant Holding Ground (EHG) was declared open by the Wildlife and Sustainable Development minister Gamini Jayawickrema Perera on Friday.
The EHG aims at keeping in rogue elephants responsible for killing people, infiltrating villages and damaging property and those who try to come back after being translocated.
The first such ground was constructed at Lunugamwehera but did not succeed. In Horowpothana, a strong steel cable fence with strong concrete posts studded with nails with electric wires on both sides of this physical fence was set up.
It is believed that this mechanism will prevent elephants breaking the fence.
The first elephant was released to the new holding ground on Friday morning. This elephant, caught for making trouble, had been kept chained at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage for nine years.
Elephant expert Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando welcomed the move to set up an EHG on an experimental level saying that it could be useful for keeping the rogue elephants that cannot be translocated elsewhere.
Dr. Fernando’s study in collaboration with the Wildlife Department, using radio collars, proved that many problematic elephants that are translocated in different areas try to come back to their original home.
Some of them get lost in this process, making trouble in other areas, sometimes getting killed in the process and killing people. Others settle in new areas close to the parks they were released and start new problems there.
“‘So an EHG could be a solution for such problem elephants,” he said, and it is also advocated in the National Policy.
“However,” he cautioned, “putting an elephant in an Elephant Holding Ground is ‘prison for life’ and we take those elephants out of the elephant gene pool.
So it is not a good option from an elephant conservation or welfare point of view, but it is a necessary evil, as we currently do not have an effective way of managing problem elephants.
“The decision to put an elephant in an EHG should be made responsibly and only taken after proper evaluation of the situation and the elephant,” Dr. Fernando said.
“What happens to the elephants put in the EHGs should be closely monitored as the concept is new. We should do it on a trial and error basis and if a problem arises, then we need to find it quickly, correct it and give it another try,” suggests Dr. Fernando.
He emphasised the need to monitor the elephants kept in the EHG, suggesting they be fitted with radio collars to monitor their movements and behaviour.
“The current EHG is only 10 sq km whereas the home range of an adult male can extend from about 50-600 sq km.
“An elephant kept in the EHG would not have many activities to engage in, so he will constantly be in search of a weak point of the fence.
The perimeter of the Horowpothana EHG is about 15km and it is not be easy to construct and maintain a fence for such a long distance without there being a weak spot – so a radio collar can help to track the elephant and put it back in case it escapes.
“We also do not know how these elephants will interact with each other when permanently limited to such a small area. For example we do not know what would happen if we have a number of adult males in the EHG and one of them comes into musth.
We also do not know how the elephants will utilize the habitat and landscape, so this too should be monitored closely.
“Once we put an elephant in a holding ground we are responsible for them for the rest of their lives.
So problems should to be identified based on elephant behaviour and needs, and remedial actions such as separation of particular elephants, supplementary feeding, habitat enrichment and so on should be implemented as required,” he added.
Dr. Fernando pointed out that elephants become rogues due to what we do to them.
Most of our human-elephant conflict mitigation measures such as making noise, chasing elephants, elephant drives, use of elephant thunder crackers, shooting at them with shot gun pellets etc. are confrontational and elephants respond to them in the long term by becoming aggressive towards humans.
Confrontation raises fear in the elephant’s mind, establishing man as an enemy and they react to it by aggression.
- (M.R.)