TEXT MAPPING – GROUP 3

Class : TLI – 2A

In this aerial photo taken on June 13, a herd of wild elephants naps outside Yuxi City, in southwest
China. Over the past year, the herd of 15 has wandered 300 miles from their home in a nature
reserve.

How to keep China's wayward

wandering elephants safe?
Experts in China are scrambling to get a family of 15 wandering elephants to
turn away from a city of 8 million.

A herd of 15 Asian elephants in China is on an unprecedented journey:

Over the past year, the pachyderms have wandered 300 miles from
their home in Xishuangbanna, a nature reserve in China’s southwestern
province of Yunnan, north toward 17 some unknown destination. Their
travels have captivated the nation. No one knows why the elephants
started migrating in the first place—or
17 where they’re headed along the
longest recorded elephant migration in China’s history.
Now, the family of elephants—six adult females, three adult males, and
six juveniles—is lingering on the outskirts of Kunming, home to more
than eight million people. In recent months, as they’ve drawn closer to
the city, they’ve encroached on human settlements, raiding crops,
wandering down streets, and searching for food in small towns .
They’ve broken into kitchens and popped into a nursing home . Some
reportedly may have gotten drunk on fermented grain. While most of
the group has banded together, one male left the main herd and is now
approximately 15 miles away from the rest
As the herd’s antics have captured public attention throughout the
country, experts are left with a daunting challenge: figuring out how to
reduce interactions between the elephants and people. Becky Shu Chen,
an Asian elephant expert at the London Zoological Society who works
closely with the frontline team monitoring the elephants, says “the goal
is simple: to avoid human-elephant confrontation.”

The elephants, shown here walking through Yuxi in June, have captured the country's attention as
they’ve destroyed crops, wandered through villages, and closed in on a major city.

“People have no experience with this kind of incident in Yunnan,” says

Shu Chen. As a result, the ground teams
17 are crafting and adapting their
response in real time. Authorities have deployed drones to track the
elephants and are primarily focused on trying to lure them back south
using food bait and physical barriers.

Chen Mingyong, a professor at Yunnan University’s School of Ecology

and Environment and a member of the expert team working on the
front lines, told state broadcaster CCTV that the team’s approach is to
“predetermine a route for the elephants, and then, along that path …
scatter food with a strong aroma, such as corn, pineapples, and
bananas.” Chen adds, “At the same time, we are blocking roads leading
to towns and cities, essentially giving the elephants the only choice of
taking the road set by us.”

In late May, food bait started to work. After preparing more than four
tons of food, the team managed to entice the elephants to make a slight
turn south. Currently, the herd is strolling back and forth within the
boundary of Yuxi, a city bordering Kunming to the south.

The perils of relocation

But according to Pan Wenjing, a Beijing-based researcher at

Greenpeace who has extensive experience in Asian elephant
conservation, food baiting isn’t a sure bet. “They need to feel safe, so
food alone probably won’t be enough to divert their migration route,”
Pan says.

Food baiting also brings risks, says Zhou Jinfeng, secretary-general of

the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development
Foundation, an NGO in Beijing. He says that moderation is key when it
comes to baiting. “We cannot let elephants become too dependent on
human-made food,” he says.

Trying to divert them with electric fencing is another tactic under

consideration, according to Chen.

Electric fences are broadly used in mitigating human-animal conflict

and to keep elephants away from crop 17 fields, for instance. But “there are
multiple challenges in using electric fences in this case,” says Raman
Sukumar, a professor of ecology at the Indian Institute of Science and a
prominent expert on Asian elephant ecology and behavior.
He explains that as the elephants wander, the fences need to be swiftly
taken down and re-installed in new spots along their path. In addition
to this impracticality, trying to get the elephants to go back where they
came from—not knowing why they left in the first place—and stay there
may be difficult, “given their unpredictable wandering nature,”
Sukumar says.

Shu Chen of the London Zoological Society believes these elephants

have simply gone too far to walk 300 miles again to return to
Xishuangbanna, the nature reserve they originated from, even with
assistance.

Some experts in China, including Zhang Jinshuo, a specialist at the

Chinese Academy of Sciences, have told state news that the possibility
of tranquilizing the elephants with anesthesia and then transporting
them back to Xishuangbanna is an option under consideration.

It is not without precedent: in 2019, Yunnan authorities captured a

male elephant, who caused extensive damage after wandering into
villages, by darting him and then transporting him back to his habitat.
But sedating and transporting a herd of 15 elephants likely hasn’t been
attempted before in Asia, says Sukumar.

In South Africa, he says, mass translocations of elephants have been

undertaken. But China lacks the expertise and infrastructure for this
sort of operation, and the geographic complexity of densely forested
Yunnan “would make it much more difficult to do than in South Africa,
where most of the tranquilizing was done in open areas.” Also, it would
carry immense risk, especially with young calves, says Greenpeace’s
Pan.

“They are a closely knit family and are visibly on alert for potential
dangers,” she says. “To tranquilize even just one elephant will very
likely agitate the entire herd, which could cause unimaginable
consequences.”
A sustainable solution

The current efforts—food baiting and fencing—are all short-term, Shu

Chen says, with the single goal of preventing wildlife-human conflict.
For many, however, the real question is how to create a sustainable
long-term solution for the elephants.

Zhou believes the best solution would be to create a new national

elephant park close to Kunming, where the group is now. “There are
many national, provincial, and municipal nature reserves in Yunnan,”
he says. “Many of them have the potential to become these elephants’
temporary and [then] permanent habitat.”

He stresses the importance of building ecological corridors connecting

the existing four elephant nature reserves in Yunnan, allowing the
animals to migrate easily and safely.

Sukumar agrees. Drawing from experience in India, Sukumar suggests

the authorities try to lure the elephants into a small holding area where
they would have food and security while experts search for a new
habitat nearby.  “If China is serious17
about wild Asian elephant
conservation, [it] needs to find this herd of elephants a new home,” he
says.

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