How scientists are using behavioral studies to help solve elephant-human conflict in Thailand
If you ever get an opportunity to go to Thailand, chances are you'll come home with a souvenir with the country's national animal on it…the Asian elephant.
Elephants are more than a point of pride in Thailand. They're part of the country's identity.
A century ago, 90% of Thailand was covered in lush forests where over a hundred thousand wild elephants roamed.
Today, that natural habitat has been reduced by more than half.....with only an estimated 4,400 wild elephants remaining.
That dwindling landscape has created a growing conflict between humans and elephants.
To understand it, we traveled to western Thailand to talk to villagers who are dealing with weekly elephant invasions and meet with scientists who believe they've come up with novel solutions to combat the problem.
Deep inside Thailand's mountainous western forest complex, 100 miles northwest of Bangkok, we made the bumpy trip into one of the country's best kept secrets - the Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary. An unconfined, lush green haven that allows 300 wild Asian elephants free-range.
Our guide was wildlife ranger Sutthichai.
Sharyn Alfonsi: How long have you been doing this work?
Ranger Suttthichai in Thai: I've been a park ranger for nine years.
He told us he's been a ranger for nine years and has noticed an increase in the number of elephants in the sanctuary.
Eager to see one up close, we stopped where a herd had just come through and hiked through the thick humidity, deeper into the sanctuary…and saw this handsome fellah. About 9 feet tall and 4 tons, he was enjoying his daily dust bath.
Created 60 years ago as thailand's first wildlife sanctuary - Salakpra is an elephant's paradise, containing more than 300 square miles of dense bamboo forests, streams and watering holes - a conservation area set up by the government to give wild elephants a protected home.
Elephants have always held a special place in Thailand's rich history. In Buddhism, they're considered sacred. Once a symbol of power for Thai royalty, and a weapon of war.
Their size and might made them ideal for Thailand's lucrative logging industry- which ended up destroying more than half their natural habitat.
In 1989, logging was banned in Thailand after devastating floods, putting thousands of elephants out of work.
The government moved quickly to find those elephants new homes. One of them, is this national conservation center in northern Thailand where mahouts - or elephant handlers - tend to all the elephants - and vets see to their medical needs. Many were brought into tourism- an industry that brings millions into the Thai economy and leaves lucky visitors like me, with a little elephant snot and a big smile.
But the country's remaining 4,000 wild elephants faced a different future. Their population is growing- about 8% a year - forcing some of them into communities to look for food. That doesn't always end well.
Over the last six years, at least 135 people have been killed by elephants in Thailand.
The problem isn't unlike human-wildlife encounters in the United States. Coyotes in cities or bears rummaging through town trash or raiding homes…
But stopping one of these massive beasts, isn't so easy. It's illegal to shoot even a charging elephant in Thailand.
American researcher Dr. Josh Plotnik and his team are trying to find a way for people and elephants to live here peacefully. We met Plotnik at the Thai elephant conservation center in northern Thailand.
Sharyn Alfonsi: There's always been elephants here. There's always been farms. Why the problem now?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: Yeah. But there haven't always been as many farmers, as many people, as much technology, as much infrastructure. And so inevitably, when you reduce the space that wildlife has. They need to figure out how to find the resources that they need. And sometimes those resources are in crop fields. And people can react very negatively to that.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Is there a breaking point?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: There definitely is. And I think we're getting close to it-- simply because we don't have solutions to these problems. And all we can do as scientists, conservationists is to try to find ways to ensure that elephants have what they need while at the same time humans have what they need.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Nice office!
Dr. Josh Plotnik: Yeah this is my favorite office.
Josh Plotnik spends summers studying elephants inside Salakpra Sanctuary and is a professor of animal behavior and cognition at Hunter College in New York.
For the past 13 years he's led the only research team inside Thailand dedicated to understanding elephant psychology, or why elephants do the things they do.
And it turns out, like New Yorkers - Asian elephants are a unique breed.
Smaller than their African cousins, when Asian elephants age, they lose pigment, creating that pinkish glow. They also have a divot on their head creating two distinct domes.
But it's what's inside their massive head that fascinates researcher Josh Plotnik.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Are all elephants alike?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: Absolutely not I mean, we see-on innovation, and problem-solving how they react to novel objects, how well they cooperate with each other. Some are more afraid of things they've never seen before. Some are less afraid. Some are brave when it comes to interacting with predators or humans.
Asian elephant's brains are four times larger than humans. They're one of the most intelligent animals in the world, which means much of their behavior is learned rather than instinctive.
Those unique experiences create unique personalities.
Dr. Josh Plotnik: And so that variation, which not only tells us something about personality in elephants, it also helps us understand why human-elephant conflict is happening, and why not every elephant in the wild is interacting with people in such a way that results in these negative interactions.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And that's the key of all this, right?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: We think so. What most people don't understand is that now, it's not me looking across a field, and seeing an elephant, and being able to peacefully observe them. Now, for villagers in some of the provinces in Thailand every night, they're worried not about this beautiful, majestic animal being on the periphery of their crop field, but this bulldozer coming in and eating their entire crop field.
Stealthy bulldozers, quietly rolling towards sweet high-octane crops like cassava and sugarcane, sometimes wiping out fields and a farm's monthly income in one night.
Dr. Josh Plotnik: We're the elephant, we're walking from a safe place, the protected sanctuary into a cropfield. They do this on almost a nightly basis, they come out of the sanctuary up to this electric fence area that's protecting this cassava field and they make a decision - do I go in and munch on the cassava or do I go back into the protected area
Surveillance cameras captured these elephants making that same journey from the sanctuary to those tasty cassava fields, carefully navigating the electric fence and raiding farmer Weera Mannewong's crops.
Weera has been farming for 20 years. He told us his income has been cut by nearly a quarter due to weekly elephant incursions - something he's desperate to stop.
Every night, he climbs a watch tower to look over his crops and patrols the edge of his fields for elephants, flashing a light from his truck or throwing firecrackers to try and scare them away.
Sharyn Alfonsi: That seems like it could be dangerous, chasing an elephant?
Weera Mannewong (English translation): It's very dangerous, but I have to do it. Otherwise they will damage all my crops.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What other kind of damage have you seen the elephants do in the village?
Weera Mannewong (English translation): They damage homes, and cars - three people have been killed recently by elephants in my village, including my Uncle.
Paweena Aekkachan is from another village 50 miles away. Her 54-year-old husband was killed trying to protect their crops.
Paweena Aekkachan (English translation): An alarm he had set up near the crops had gone off - but that night the elephant didn't go away. My husband ran out to try and scare him and he tripped in the field and that's when the elephant trampled him.
And it's not just on farms… people in villages have been trampled… as the elephants occasionally invade homes at night and run along roads - sometimes raiding sugarcane trucks along the way.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So what do you do?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: I wish we had a simple answer to that question. There are a lot of different ways to do this. One is to focus on the people. Can we find different crops for them to plant that maybe the elephants aren't attracted to? Can we find ways to set up more permanent barriers? But what we're trying to do that I think is unique is focusing on the elephant. Right? If elephant behavior varies from one elephant to the next, is that something that might inform the development of new strategies that are targeted at specific personality traits, certain behavioral traits that these elephants are exhibiting that might be better or stronger long-term solutions that would prevent elephants from coming into crop fields?
When people and wildlife meet unexpectedly, the result... isn't always good. Decades of deforestation and overdevelopment of natural habitat have left wild animals in search of new sources for food.
In the United States, that might look like a bear busting into a home looking for lunch, but in Thailand it's an even bigger problem…thousands of pounds bigger. Increasingly, wild Asian elephants have wandered into towns and villages looking for food…sometimes, with deadly consequences.
Now, American researcher and elephant behavior specialist Dr. Josh Plotnik hopes he may have found a solution to this growing problem.
Josh Plotnik's big a-ha moment on how complex Asian elephant behavior can be came 13 years ago in northern Thailand.
He placed a mirror in the middle of a field and watched to see what 5-year-old, 2-ton Lynchee would do.
Instead of seeing herself as another threatening animal and attacking the mirror, Lynchee - like any self-respecting girl- began checking herself out. Inspecting her face and mouth, showing a higher level of intelligence and self-directed behavior... launching Josh Plotnik into a new realm of study.
Sharyn Alfonsi: How much have they been studied, the elephant's brain, at this point?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: Not much at all. Most of what we know about elephant behavior comes from these long-term field sites in Africa and a few long-term field sites in Asia-- that are mainly focused on understanding population dynamics. But actually studying what's going on inside an elephant's mind requires you to do controlled experiments where you actually are interacting with the elephants up close. That's really difficult to do in the wild, but we're learning.
Josh Plotnik has spent the last five years leading a team of American and Thai researchers in long-term studies of wild Asian elephant behavior in Thailand's Salakpra Sanctuary.
Their tests have evolved from elephants reacting to novel objects like brushes and fire hoses in trees, to one of the team's most groundbreaking behavioral experiments to date - the puzzle box.
The test is made up of three metal boxes, three doors and a sweet reward inside.
Sharyn Alfonsi: You've got the answers. How does this work?
Sarah Jacobson - a postdoctoral researcher at Hunter College in New York - designed the box and is part of Plotnik's research team.
Sarah Jacobson: This top one is a slide door. You just have to slide to the right and then reach in and grab the bananas from in there. And then we have a push door, which is just held by a magnet right there. And so you push open and reach in. And then this pull door where they have to wrap their trunk around and pull down.
Jacobson says in the wild some elephants are amazing problem solvers. Particularly when they're hungry. Those trunks can smell water and food as far as 12 miles away.
So how innovative would these elephants be with the puzzle boxes? We sat back and watched.
Sniffing the banana inside, 17-year-old Nammei starts knocking repeatedly on the boxes …probing each door ...until she finds success by pushing in door number 2, grabbing that reward inside.
Sarah Jacobson: She innovated to open the first door. That was something she'd never seen before. But now we want her to use a different technique and try and open a different door. She has to change her behavior to do something different to try to open it.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Oh gosh. She's thinking.
Sarah Jacobson: She's thinking.
Sharyn Alfonsi: She got to pull that chain?
Sarah Jacobson: Yeah.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Yay!
Sarah Jacobson: She did it.
Dr. Josh Plotnik: That was impressive.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Well done!
When Jacobson put the test up in the wild, some elephants seemed to be afraid and ran away from the puzzle boxes. Some tried using brute force, others were fascinated but left…well, puzzled.
Over two years, 176 elephants approached the puzzle box and 58 of them solved at least one door.
But this one - a 5-ton adult male - put them all to shame, figuring out all three doors in less than 2 minutes.
So what has all this puzzle solving shown?
Plotnik believes like people, elephants show a huge range of innovation and persistence. A factor he thinks could be key in deterring the more tenacious elephants from raiding farms and villages.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So you're looking for the troublemaker elephants?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: Correct. The elephant has evolved this capacity for hearing really well, and smelling really well and using their trunk to manipulate aspects of their environment and so when they come into contact with something new or novel but they know that there's something they really want on the other side of that novel thing elephants with certain personality traits find ways around those deterrents.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So if they're cognitively flexible, we need to take a more flexible approach to keeping them away from humans.
Dr. Josh Plotnik: I think that's exactly what we need to be doing and how we need to think about it.
Something veterinarian and leading Thai wildlife researcher Boripat Siriaroonrat spends a lot of time thinking about.
We met up with Boripat working with a local patrol to track down a wild elephant named Mango.
20-years-old and weighing in at a hefty 10,000 pounds, Mango had made his way down from the mountains and into this rural village in eastern Thailand.
Boripat Siriaroonrat: It's about 5:15 p.m., so he started to become active and start to go out, looking for food.
We spent the next two hours following a feasting Mango from this back garden....down the main road......
And straight into and through the village's central square -strolling past the local restaurant and on to his next meal as locals stood back in amazement and took photos.
We knew Mango would be here because six months ago Boripat, along with a team of rangers and vets, went deep into the forest, and put a massive tracking collar like this around Mango's neck while he was sedated.
Boripat Siriaroonrat: Every day we get coordinates on their whereabouts sending to my mailbox. And then we can actually log in on a website to see exactly where the elephants are.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And then what do you with that information?
Boripat Siriaroonrat: We can warn the people, you know, how far is this group of five elephants from their household, so they can be mentally, physically prepared to deal with their-- their daily routines.
Elephants are tracked at this command center - where a team monitors five that have been tagged so far.
Here you can see a map of the village where we met Mango - the red dot and line show where he's headed and where he's been over the last 24 hours.
Warnings are sent back from the command center to the phones of the village patrol.
Boripat Siriaroonrat: There's photos of the elephant that they spotted at night, in which property and which owner. So they warn each family to look out for the elephants and the danger that might come with the elephants.
Josh Plotnik is now working with Boripat to enhance his own theories on behavior to stop elephants like Mango from wandering into farms and villages. Short of putting a growling predator in its path, it's hard to get an elephant to retreat when it's looking for food.
So Plotnik's team has created a more manageable deterrent. It's called the Targeted Personality Device.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What's a Targeted Personality Device?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: The idea is that you're basically targeting mitigation for human-elephant conflict at a particular individual based on their personality it has-- three programmable components. So if an elephant is coming into a crop field regularly and the farmer and we as researchers can identify that elephant, we can say, "Okay, that elephant has these particular personality traits. Let's program this Targeted Personality Device based on those traits and hope that that creates a situation where the elephant doesn't want to go into the crop field any longer."
In other words, by knowing what kind of elephant they're dealing with, scientists can find the right thing to warn them away.
We went with Josh Plotnik and researcher Matthew Rudolph to a farmer's crop field to see the Targeted Personality Device in action.
Dr. Josh Plotnik: So this computer system allows us to play back multi-modal sensory information for the elephant. In other words, we can display lights that strobe or have different colors. We can play back acoustic information that's programmed for a potential predator and then we can spray olfactory information that sends a signal to the elephant that there might be the smell of a tiger or the smell of a human close by. So, for instance, if Matthew were to press number two, which would indicate an elephant that might be afraid of potential predators, it would play back-- the sound of a predator.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So, you're throwing everything at them?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: Yeah. The whole idea here is to create a sensory world for the elephant. They're gonna be able to see, hear, and smell a potential predator enough to say, "This is not a good place for me to be."
Here you can see when an elephant approaches ….flashing lights…spraying odor and the sound of a yelling woman send the elephant running away and back into the jungle. The trick for scientists is knowing how each elephant will respond.
Plotnik hopes that by understanding each elephant's unique personality traits…scientists can help create harmony between the most sacred animal in Thailand…and its people.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What is it that conservationists, and scientists, and government officials have gotten wrong about trying to stop this human-elephant conflict up till now?
Dr. Josh Plotnik: I think people really need to understand how serious this problem could grow simply because you have an intelligent animal on both sides. And if you have an intelligent elephant and an intelligent human trying to share limited resources, conflict is inevitable until we come up with better solutions to promote coexistence.
Sharyn Alfonsi: You kinda need to know (elephant sound) all right.
Dr. Josh Plotnik: He wants us to be done. (laughter)
Sharyn Alfonsi: That's a wrap.
Produced by Ashley Velie. Associate Producer, Jennifer Dozor. Broadcast associate, Erin DuCharme. Edited by Michael Mongulla.
