Elephants Hijack Sugarcane Trucks

In 2003, hungry elephants went on the rampage in eastern Thailand, ransacking villagers' plantations and forcing sugarcane trucks to stop so they can raid their goods.Dry-season shortages have forced the 130 elephants from Ang Lue Nai wildlife sanctuary, which sprawls over five provinces, to seek food and water in nearby settlements, the sanctuary's chief Yoo Senatham told the Bangkok Post .Yoo said the elephants had learned to pick up sugarcane dropped by drivers who took pity on them, but that the practice had taught them dangerous new habits.He told the daily of incidents where the leader of the herd had stood in the road to block the vehicle while the others unloaded the produce with their trunks.Faced with the shortage of natural fodder in the jungle, the animals were now "just waiting for food to be dropped, rather than looking for food. This is dangerous," he said.Truck drivers are now banned from dropping food in the hope the elephants will stop their aggressive behavior.Yoo said villagers would build an electric fence to protect their crops and set up a mechanism so they could mobilize quickly to disperse the animals when they came on a raid.

A study of African elephants suggests they may be more numerous than they were four years ago, scientists say. They think there are from 400,000 to 660,000 elephants across the continent, with large numbers in southern Africa. The scientists, from IUCN-The World Conservation Union, are interpreting their findings with extreme caution.They say one explanation may be that the elephants are fleeing to protected areas to try to escape human pressure, thus giving an unduly hopeful picture. Habitat loss and competition between people and elephants for resources remain among the principal challenges in elephant conservation. The scientists are members of IUCN's African elephant specialist group, and their study, the African Elephant Status Report, updates one produced in 1999. It is the latest in a series derived from a database on African elephants which since 1986 has been compiling information from the 37 countries where the animals live. The 1999 report concluded there were at least 300,000 elephants in Africa, and possibly as many as 487,000. The updated version says the higher figures may be partly explained by reported increases in savanna elephant populations in Botswana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. One of the report's authors, Julian Blanc, said the increase revealed little about how populations were faring at the continental level. He suspected there could be a more worrying explanation for the apparent population growth that the elephants were crowding together for safety.He said: "Most elephant surveys are restricted to protected areas, and it is precisely to protected areas that elephants flock when their range is compressed by expanding human populations. A high concentration of elephants in protected areas can give a misleading impression of increasing numbers."