As humans and elephants clash more in Thailand, scientists are looking for solutions
Thailand's most revered animal — the wild Asian elephant — has now become one of the country's biggest problems.
Decades of deforestation and overdevelopment of natural habitat is pushing wild elephants into farms and villages in search of food, increasingly with dangerous consequences.
Paweena Aekkachan lost her 54-year-old husband earlier this year when he ran out into their crop field in western Thailand to try and stop an elephant from eating their precious cassava. More than130 people have been killed by wild elephants in Thailand over the last six years.
Thai farmers and villagers have tried a variety of methods to stop these multi-ton beasts from rolling through: erecting electric fences, throwing firecrackers at them and digging trenches around their crop fields. None of them have been effective.
Elephant research as a potential solution
Dr. Josh Plotnik is working to solve that. Plotnik, a professor of animal behavior and cognition at Hunter College, CUNY in New York, spends summers studying wild elephants inside Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary — a lush elephant paradise deep inside the country's mountainous western forest complex. Here, 300 wild elephants roam freely.
He's using years of research on elephant behavior to develop novel techniques to stop wild elephants from invading Thai crop fields and villages. He 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.
"I think people really need to understand how serious this problem could grow simply because you have an intelligent animal on both sides," Plotnik said. "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."
Elephants' long history in Thailand
Stopping a wild elephant is a challenge. It's illegal to shoot even a charging elephant in Thailand, where elephants are not only protected – they're a strong part of the country's cultural identity.
Most people in Thailand are Buddhist — a religion in which elephants are considered sacred. Elephants have been seen as a symbol of power for Thai royalty and, historically, have even been used as a weapon of war.
A century ago, 90% of Thailand was covered in lush forests where over 100,000 wild elephants roamed. Their size and might made them ideal for Thailand's lucrative logging industry, which ended up destroying more than half of their natural habitat. In 1989, logging was banned in Thailand after devastating flooding.
With elephants out of work, the government moved to find them new homes, including a national conservation center in northern Thailand where mahouts — or elephant handlers — tend to the elephants and veterinarians meet their medical needs.
Many were brought into tourism, an industry that pumps millions into the Thai economy.
Elephants hurting Thai farms
Today, only an estimated 4,400 wild elephants remain in Thailand. Their population is growing about 8% a year, forcing some of them into communities to look for food to supplement their hefty diets. Wild Asian elephants consume anywhere from 165-330 pounds of food a day.
Plotnik, who has been working to find a way for people and elephants to peacefully coexist, said for some villagers, elephants are like "bulldozers."
"They do this on almost a nightly basis," Plotnik said. "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?"
Elephants can wipe out a farmer's monthly income in a single night. Surveillance video shows elephants raiding farmer Weera Mannewong's crops. He has been farming for nearly 20 years and said his income has been cut by nearly a quarter because of weekly elephant incursions. Mannewong is desperate to stop it.
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 scare them away. "It's very dangerous, but I have to do it," Mannewong said. "Otherwise they will damage all my crops."
He's seen elephants damage homes and cars, too. He also lost family to an elephant.
"Three people have been killed recently by elephants in my village , including my uncle," Mannewong said.
The elephants occasionally invade homes at night. They also run along roads, sometimes raiding sugar cane trucks along the way.
The elephant warning system
American scientist Josh Plotnik is working with Thai veterinarian and wildlife researcher Boripat Siriaroonrat to innovate other solutions to the human-elephant conflict.
Six months ago, Siriaroonrat, along with a team of rangers and vets, put a massive tracking collar around the neck of Mango, a 20-year-old, 10,000-pound elephant — it's part of a pilot program supported by the National Research Council of Thailand that Siriaroonrat hopes will eventually serve as a national elephant warning system.
60 Minutes traveled with Siriaroonrat to a small village to track Mango. He had come down from the mountains and into town looking for dinner, strolling through backyards and the main square, making his way past the local restaurant as locals stood by in amazement.
Five elephants have been tagged so far and a team tracks their movements at a command center run by the Department of National Parks in eastern Thailand.
Every day, Siriaroonrat gets elephant coordinates in his inbox.
"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," Siriaroonrat said.
Warnings are sent from the command center to the phones of a village patrol.
"There's photos of the elephant that they spotted at night, in which property and which owner," Siriaroonrat said. "So they warn each family to look out for the elephant and the danger that might come with the elephants."
Scientists work to resolve human-elephant conflicts
Siriaroonrat is also working with Plotnik to determine how learning more about elephant behavior may stop elephants like Mango from wandering into farms and villages.
Plotnik worries they're nearing a breaking point in the human-elephant conflict.
"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," he said.
Plotnik, a professor of animal behavior and cognition at Hunter College, CUNY in New York, leads the only research team inside Thailand dedicated to understanding why elephants do the things they do.
Elephants are one of the most intelligent animals in the world, which means much of their behavior is learned, rather than instinctive. Their unique experiences create unique personalities and those differences, Plotnik believes, are the key in trying to understand how to help resolve the conflict.
"What we're trying to do, that I think is unique, is focusing on the elephant," Plotnik said. "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?"
Plotnik realized how complex Asian elephant behavior can be 13 years ago. He'd placed a mirror in the middle of a field and watched to see what Lynchee, a 5-year-old, 2-ton elephant, would do. Instead of seeing herself as another threatening animal and attacking the mirror, Lynchee began checking herself out, showing a higher level of intelligence and self-directed behavior.
By that point, very little research had been done on wild Asian elephant behavior.
"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," Plotnik said.
He 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 seeing how elephants react to novel objects, like brushes and fire hoses in trees, to installing a puzzle box designed by a postdoctoral researcher on Plotnik's team.
The puzzle box, made up of three metal boxes with three types of doors, has treats hidden inside. When the box was installed in the wild, some elephants were scared of it and ran away, while others seemed fascinated, but couldn't quite figure it out.
Others tried using brute force to get in. A number of elephants solved at least one of the doors. One of them proved to be a genius, solving all three doors in less than two minutes.
Plotnik believes that like people, elephants show a huge range of persistence and innovation –a factor he thinks could be key in deterring the more tenacious elephants from raiding farms and villages. A flexible approach needs to be taken to dealing with the cognitively flexible species, he said.
Targeted Personality Device
Short of putting a growling predator in an elephant's path, it's hard to get one to retreat when it's looking for food. So Plotnik's team created a Targeted Personality Device with three components based on different senses.
Depending on the personality of the incoming wild elephant, the device will spray the odor of a tiger or human, send out a series of flashing lights and play the sound of a growling predator or someone yelling — creating a sensory overload to deter the invading elephant.
"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, 'OK, that elephant has these particular personality traits. Let's program this Targeted Personality Device based on those traits and hope that creates a situation where the elephant doesn't want to go into the crop field any longer,'" Plotnik said.
By knowing what type of elephant they're dealing with, scientists hope they can find the right way to scare the elephant away.
"They're gonna be able to see, hear and smell a potential predator," Plotnik said. "Enough to say, 'This is not a good place for me to be.'"
