From loud sounds to stones and flambeaus, firecrackers and metal sharps, man’s modes of chasing away elephants foraying for food into human settlements have changed, and violently so.
A documentary short, Big Social Nomad (Pelican Media) by Swedish filmmaker Anna Bohlmark, puts the spotlight on the human-elephant conflict and its portents for the survival of the beasts of the wild due to rampant defiling of their natural habitats for human settlement.
“One can’t understate the importance of this issue in India with a 1.2 billion population and houses half the Asian elephant population”, said Ms. Bohlmark after premiering the film at the Aurodhan recently.
The 25-minute documentary involved a six-month effort, including shooting in the wildlife habitats in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.
As it focuses on the problem of growing magnitude and draws out the views of wildlife experts, the film puts the increasing depredation of forest lands and rampant development as the root cause of the conflict.
Consider this: the number of Asian elephants has rapidly declined from an estimated three lakh a century ago to just 27,000 wild elephants live in India that account for half of their total population. About 4,000 of them live in captivity as temple elephants.
Lack of land
In India, the largest threat to the survival of elephants from extinction is lack of land which is steadily being compromised to meet the development needs of a 1.2 billion population, the film states.
Driving away or relocating the animal will not help as they have been found to recolonise the same areas. In this conflict, people and elephants sustain grievous injuries, some even lose lives.
Tracing the origins of forest denudation to the British era when massive tracts of elephant habitats were converted into primarily tea plantations, the film points out that the human-elephant conflict is particularly severe in these regions. “Now, we can’t tell people that this is a converted elephant habitat or ask them to move out of the landscape”, said
Experts advocate striking a balance between development and preserving what remains of natural habitats. “If that balance is lost, every species suffers, including humans,” as Ananda Kumar of Nature Conservation Foundation put it. As natural habitats shrink, elephants have been moving farther and farther — sometimes covering a distance of 40 miles — for food. And, these ‘nomads’ follow a cyclical mode of feeding in a habitat and moving to another to allow for regeneration before they return.
These narrow paths, or the corridors, are vital for the beasts to pass from one habitat to another. However, at many places human encroachments have further shrunk these corridors.
Pointing out that many human lives could have been saved if they knew about presence of elephants in their vicinity, experts also said that the key in avoiding man-elephant conflict is to develop a communication alert system on elephant locations.
Empathetic response
The film cites an instance of a house pulled down by an elephant to rescue her calf trapped inside.
The woman who fled with her child from danger would later tell wildlife officials that she totally related her own frenzied efforts to save her child with that of the mother elephant’s bid to rescue her baby calf.
Or another instance of a tribal woman who after ten years of persuasion agrees to resettle from her house in a forest for the sake of elephants. If anybody else had come to move her out for welfare reasons or resettlement in a city, she would have refused, she told negotiators.
“This woman is a symbol of tribal acceptance of this idea that forests must go back to the animals,” says Vivek Menon of Wildlife Trust of India.
Though it is ironic that elephants have become critically endangered in a land where cultural tradition confers on these creatures godly status and where a caparisoned parade is the ultimate showpiece of a religious festival, it is precisely this sustaining social tradition of love for the genial giants that gives hope for a future where man and elephant coexist in this hub of Asian elephants, says Ms. Bohlmark.
The ‘Big Social Nomad’ is to be presented at film festivals and on television subsequently. On Independence Day eve, a screening has been organised at the Raj Nivas at 6.30 pm and the same day in Auroville Town hall in Cinema Paradiso at 8 pm.
The film, which is being promoted by Elephant Family, an NGO patronised by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, is slated for a London premiere in October, Ms. Bohlmark said.
