Indonesia gives villagers tips on warding off wild elephants

Indonesia gives villagers tips on warding off wild elephants
Borneo Bulletin September 14, 2006
JAKARTA (AFP)

Faced with increasing conflict between elephants and people, Indonesia has been giving tips to villagers on how to calmly ward off the beasts, an official said Wednesday.

Some 50 people from villages in Sebuku, an area on Indonesian Borneo which neighbours the Malaysian state of Sabah, took a three-day course this week, said Mochamad Danang Anggoro of the East Kalimantan Nature Conservation Agency. "We provided them with two days training on how to detect the presence of elephants, how to face them, and how to ward them off," he told AFP.

The villagers were taught how to chase hungry elephants away without frightening them, such as using noise, lights and smoke, he said. The course included a third day of surveying the jungle to detect trails left by elephants and building early warning equipment, such as bamboo contraptions to alert villagers of approaching pachyderms.

Up to 60 Borneo elephants are believed to be living in the area around Sebuku, Anggoro said. "The rapid growth of palm oil plantations in the area has reduced their habitat and the elephants have been increasingly roaming out of their forests for food since 2005," he said. Last year incidents of elephants entering settlements were limited to about one a month but they had become increasingly frequent this year, he said.

The Kompas daily quoted Sebuku's local government head Jumianto as saying that 3,000 palm oil trees and 16 hectares (40 acres) of other crops had been destroyed by the animals since last year. Borneo elephants, of which only an estimated 1,000 remain, are smaller, tamer and better-tempered compared with their cousins on Sumatra, the only other island in Indonesia where elephants are found.

http://www.brunei-online.com/bb/thu/sep14b4.htm