In Nepal, officials defend detusking to reduce human-elephant conflict (Kathmandu)
In Nepal, officials defend detusking to reduce human-elephant conflict
(Kathmandu)
Abhaya Raj Joshi, Mongabay
November 28, 2022
See link
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/11/in-nepal-officials-defend-detusking-to-reduce-human-elephant-conflict/
for photos.
On the afternoon of Oct. 28, a wild male elephant attacked and killed a
woman herding her sheep at a pasture in the town of Amlekhgunj, in the
buffer zone of Parsa National Park in southern Nepal.
The death of Rukaiya Khatun, 51, made headlines in news media across the
country, and prompted calls from rural residents for the authorities to do
something about incidents of human-elephant conflict.
Nepal is home to some 227 Indian elephants (Elephas maximus indicus) — the
number fluctuates as the pachyderms move across the plains between Nepal
and India — and human-elephant conflict has emerged as a pressing wildlife
issue here. In the past two decades, 274 people have died in incidents
related to human-elephant conflict.
In the Amlekhgunj incident, the elephant involved, named Yamgaj by local
authorities, had previously been on the radar of Parsa National Park
officials. He was one of three wild male elephants that had arrived in the
area around two months earlier from the eastern part of the country. While
the two others roamed the forests, Yamgaj moved around the periphery of the
national park, likely drawn there by the female elephants kept at a
government-run captive-breeding center in Amlekhgunj, said Ashok Ram, chief
conservation officer of Parsa National Park.
Fearful of another attack, residents called on the park authorities to do
something about the animal. With the approval of the Department of National
Parks and Wildlife Reserves, Ram’s team tranquilized Yamgaj less than 24
hours after the attack.
“We had no other option but to sedate the animal,” Ram told Mongabay. “We
then decided to trim its tusks so that it becomes less aggressive. It’s
usually teenage male elephants that rebel from their group and form
separate groups. The elephant that killed the woman was a member of a
three-member group that had rebelled from its larger pack.”
Officials say cutting off an elephant’s tusks after tranquilizing it can
help make it less aggressive. But the practice is a controversial one as
tusks are important for elephants when rooting for food and in courtship
displays. Cutting them off, critics say, piles more pressure on Indian
elephants, categorized as endangered on the IUCN Red List, in addition to
the growing threats they already face in Nepal from habitat loss and forest
fragmentation.
“We trim the tusks only to a point where there aren’t blood vessels. We
have seen that trimming really works,” Ram said. “This time also, after we
trimmed the tusks, we haven’t seen the elephant in the area for a long
time.”
Detusking, as the practice is known, has also been carried out on African
elephants (Loxodonta africana) to reduce human-elephant conflict. At the
Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya, for instance, researchers found it to
have drastically reduced fence-breaking incidents.
Another study at the same site found that short-tusked and detusked
elephants didn’t seem to have a nutrient deficiency compared to other
elephants. The study, however, found that tusk length was associated with
differences in fitness in the case of female elephants, especially the
matriarchs. It found that matriarchs with significantly larger tusks
commanded a bigger group compared to short-tusked ones, indicating that
long-tusked females were looked upon by males as having higher reproductive
fitness.
The study calls for more research to be carried out to ascertain the link
between detusking and its effects on male elephants’ diet and reproductive
fitness. Until more is understood about the effects, detusking should only
be carried out judiciously after assessing the availability of food such as
grass and twigs necessary for short-tusked elephants to survive.
Animal welfare activists also say detusking should be done cautiously.
“While in the short term trimming the tusks of elephants may help calm it
down, we don’t know how much pain they might suffer from or what its
long-term consequences will be for them,” said Nepali animal rights
activist Shristi Singh Shrestha.
“Elephants are very smart creatures, and they might suffer from mental
trauma of having their tusks cut off,” Shrestha told Mongabay. She added
authorities should instead adopt long-term measures, such as restoration of
habitat and establishment of safe corridors for the animals, to address the
problem of human-elephant conflict.