AS PART OF OUR ELEPHANTS IN CRISIS CAMPAIGN, BORN FREE’S FIELD CONSERVATION ASSISTANT EMILY NEIL EXPLAINS HOW FIERY HOT CHILLIES ARE HELPING TO COOL DOWN HUMAN-ELEPHANT CONFLICT

Elephants are sensitive and intelligent, and they play a crucial role in their ecosystem. As ‘gardeners of the forest’ and ‘ecosystem engineers’, elephants knock down large trees, disperse seeds over huge distances, dig waterholes in dry river beds, create trails that act as fire breaks, and in these ways drastically remodel their habitats. 

Living alongside the world’s largest land mammal is not easy, and these important behaviours can be catastrophic for local people. An elephant may leave a trail of destruction through villages or farmland by toppling trees, eating and destroying crops, tearing down fencing, and even injuring or killing people. Habitat loss and expanding human populations are forcing people and elephants to compete over the shrinking land and resources and pushing them into ever-increasing contact. The result is a ‘tinderbox’ situation that often descends into dangerous or deadly conflict.

Crop foraging is one of the most common forms of human elephant conflict. Elephants eat hundreds of pounds of forage a day, and a single hungry individual can make light work of a palatable crop field. This can be devastating for local people who may lose their livelihoods or an entire year’s worth of food in a single night. In retaliation, and in a desperate attempt to protect their crops, locals will sometimes shoot, spear, or poison elephants. Unsurprisingly, such conflict may also make people less likely to support elephant conservation. 

Born Free is working to alleviate human-elephant conflict at both our flagship elephant conservation sites: Babile Elephant Sanctuary in Ethiopia and Banyang-Mbo in Cameroon. Part of our strategy to reduce elephant crop foraging is to construct chilli pepper fences around crop fields that are prone to elephant visits. These fences are built by dipping fabric into a potent concoction of chilli and engine oil, then hanging the saturated fabric onto fences made of wooden posts and rope. Elephants have sensitive noses and the acrid smell of hot chilli is a strong deterrent, causing them to avoid peoples’ farms. The chilli can also be a valuable cash crop and provide farmers with extra income. 

Excitingly, chilli pepper fences constructed at Banyang-Mbo Wildlife Sanctuary in 2017 successfully prevented elephants from crop foraging during the dry season. This has fostered support for our elephant conservation initiatives, and within time we hope that these communities will assist us in preventing elephant poaching. 

We hope to see similar results at our new chilli pepper fencing project at Babile Elephant Sanctuary. The region is densely populated, and extensive livestock grazing and subsistence agriculture are surrounding and pushing into protected elephant habitat. The resulting conflict is severe, and both human and elephant lives have been lost. 

Some 40% of elephant killings at Babile Elephant Sanctuary are committed in retaliation for crop foraging. Alleviating this form of conflict is therefore essential for the economic security of human communities (which affects many other important aspects of community life such as health and education) and the effective protection of elephants. We are hopeful that our new chilli pepper fencing project will lessen crop foraging, and help people and elephants co-exist in peace.

ELEPHANTS IN CRISIS