When an elephant wandered out of South Africa’s Kruger National Park into the nearby village of Matsulu on 10 February 2024, hundreds of people gathered around and chased it.
Wildlife officials tried to return the elephant to the park, but in the end had to destroy it.
Elephants that leave Kruger National Park are generally treated as “damage-causing animals” under government policy. If an elephant is considered a danger to people, it may be put down.
The incident sparked debate. Some portrayed the elephant’s death as a tragic outcome. Others argued that human safety had to come first.
Those debates are understandable. But they almost always focus on the same question: what should happen once an elephant has already entered a village?
We are wildlife researchers who have been studying human-wildlife coexistence and local livelihoods in South Africa. We looked at 55 social media posts on this elephant’s escape and noticed that some posts indicated that people might have tampered with the park fence and encouraged elephants to exit the park so that they could have the meat if it was killed.
Read more: Community lessons on how humans and wildlife can co-exist
This prompted us to ask a broader question: were some people benefiting when elephants left Kruger National Park, and could those benefits be influencing what happened after elephants entered nearby communities?
One possible incentive is that when an elephant is destroyed after entering a community, its meat is commonly distributed to nearby residents. Some people may also receive financial benefits linked to the carcass. For example, a relatively small number of individuals may also profit financially from trophy hunting related activities if a client is available.
We wanted to know whether these benefits could influence some people to stop elephants returning to the park, or even prompt them to leave it in the first place.
We then surveyed 1,551 households in 12 communities bordering the park to find out. We also asked these families about their experiences of elephant conflict and what approaches to elephant management they supported.
Our research found that most people we interviewed supported non-lethal elephant management. Many believed current policies might encourage some people to bring elephants out of the park or stop them returning.
This matters because the current system may be sending the wrong message. If communities receive benefits only after an elephant has been killed, there is less incentive to prevent conflict before it happens.
Instead, elephant management policies should reward communities for keeping people and elephants safely apart. That way, communities benefit more from preventing conflict than from dealing with its consequences.
Communities want to protect both lives and elephants
Human-elephant conflict is often presented as an unavoidable consequence of people and wildlife sharing the same landscapes. Because elephants can damage crops, destroy property and, on rare occasions, injure or kill people, it is often assumed that people living alongside elephants support killing them when conflict occurs.
Our research challenges that assumption.
Many of the families we interviewed had experienced the costs of living alongside elephants. About one in ten reported that they knew someone who had been killed by an elephant within the previous five years.
But despite living with the costs of conflict, 72.1% of respondents said they would support a non-lethal approach if an effective alternative to killing elephants were available. In practice, this could include capturing roaming elephants and safely returning them to Kruger National Park.
More than half (51.1%) also said they supported this because of conservation or animal welfare concerns.
At the same time, many of the people we interviewed said elephants should be killed if they were threatening people’s lives or destroying crops and livelihoods. This suggests that support for non-lethal management depends on effective alternatives being available.
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Rather than choosing between people and elephants, many respondents wanted solutions that protected both. If most people support effective non-lethal solutions, then we also need to ask why elephants continue to end up in situations where lethal control becomes necessary.
When benefits follow conflict
More than half the people we interviewed (52.8%) said they’d benefited following the killing of elephants involved in conflict, most commonly by receiving meat.
Near the Kruger National Park, the practice is that if an escaped elephant is causing a danger to humans and has to be killed, its meat is commonly distributed within neighbouring communities. This arrangement recognises the costs that communities bear for living alongside elephants.
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Nearly four in ten of the people we interviewed (39.4%) believed that the meat and financial benefits associated with elephants being killed could encourage some people to prevent elephants from leaving communities once they had arrived.
A smaller number (11.9%) believed these same benefits could encourage some people to bring elephants out of the park in the first place.
Current best practice aims to prevent elephants entering villages by reducing attractants, protecting crops using appropriate deterrents, and maintaining barriers where possible, with game reserve officials responding rapidly when elephants leave protected areas so they can be safely returned before they pose a serious risk to people.
Read more: What camera traps tell us about elephants eating crops
If an elephant has to be destroyed as a last resort, our findings suggest that the long-standing practice of distributing elephant meat, along with any associated financial benefits, should be reviewed to ensure it is not unintentionally creating incentives that undermine efforts to prevent human-elephant conflict.
If the practice is not reviewed, we believe there’s a chance the current incentive structure may allow the actions of a relatively small number of individuals to shape conservation outcomes for the wider community.
Policies are needed to make sure that communities benefit more from successful coexistence than from the aftermath of conflict.
What needs to happen next
This is not an argument against supporting communities that live alongside elephants. On the contrary, people who bear the costs of living with wildlife should benefit from conservation. The challenge is to design policies that encourage people and elephants to coexist safely, rather than creating rewards only after conflict has occurred.
For example, communities could receive benefits while elephants remain safely inside protected areas.
Read more: How elephants raid crops in Kenya’s Masai Mara has changed. Why it matters
There are many ways to do this. Communities can benefit from jobs linked to conservation, tourism and other wildlife-based businesses that do not depend on killing animals. Governments and conservation agencies can also invest in practical, non-lethal measures to keep elephants away from people.
Previous research has shown that many communities living next to Kruger National Park are open to these kinds of opportunities. Our findings suggest that linking conservation benefits more closely to successful coexistence could reduce conflict while improving both elephant conservation and local livelihoods.
The authors thank the communities who participated in this study and the field teams who made the research possible. The authors also extend thanks to Dr Tom Moorhouse and Dr Prince Nketiah for their collaboration on this research and informative insights on this article.
Neil D’Cruze was formerly Head of Research at the international NGO World Animal Protection and was a Visiting Researcher at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), University of Oxford. He is currently a Non-Executive Co-Director of Blood Lions and a Visiting Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Angie Elwin is affiliated with an international NGO, World Animal Protection, as the Head of Research, and is a Visiting Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Herbert Ntuli received research funding from the World Animal Protection. He was formerly a Senior Lecturer at the University of Pretoria. Herbert is currently a Principal Researcher in Resource Economics at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and an Extraordinary Lecturer at the University of Pretoria.
This article was originally published on The Conversation by Neil D’Cruze, Visiting Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University and is republished here unaltered under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-ND, no derivatives). Read the original article.
