KANDY, Sri Lanka––
An AVAAZ petition addressed to Sri Lanka’s President Anura Kumara Dissanayake by Champa Fernando, President of the Kandy Animal Advocacy Organization KACPAW, alleges “Daily shooting of wild elephants after a government member of Parliament called upon citizens to ‘shoot any animal that wanders into their lands,’ openly inviting them to act in contravention of the Fauna & Flora Protection Ordinance with impunity, issuing 13,207 firearms as of now to deal with crop damage, and publicising off-the-cuff that we have ‘4,000, too many wild elephants.’
“Mr. President,” Fernando wrote in the preface to her petition, “the woefully understaffed and under-equipped Department of Wildlife Conservation is unable to treat the wounded elephants at the same frequency the wild elephants are being shot now.
“Unattended for months, limping around in pain”
“Bullet-ridden elephants, unattended for months, limping around in pain,” Fernando charged, “are what we and the tourists see as Sri Lanka’s wildlife wonders, with carcasses of fatally shot wild elephants increasingly being shown on media, tarnishing Sri Lanka’s image as a top animal-and nature-friendly tourist destination.”
The ongoing elephant/human conflict has been brewing for at least a decade, heating up in 2019, when some of the estimated 7,000 to 7,500 wild elephants in Sri Lanka killed about 150 humans.
Of the 361 elephants who reportedly died in Sri Lanka during 2019, 85% were reportedly killed by humans to protect their crops and homes.
Sri Lanka is a nation in which, according to the United Nations World Food Programme, 32% of households suffer food insecurity.
This is defined as “a lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy life.”
Protected on paper
Elephants in Sri Lanka are strictly protected, on paper. Poaching elephants for ivory can potentially bring a death sentence. But killing elephants in self-defense is permitted.
And Sri Lanka, an island nation only slightly larger than the single U.S. state of West Virginia, with more than ten times as many people, does have quite a lot of elephants by comparison to other elephant range states.
The African nation of Gabon, for example, has 10,000 elephants and 2.5 million people, but is more than four times the size of either Sri Lanka or West Virginia.
The African nations of Sierra Leone and Togo, each close to the size of Sri Lanka, have only about 300 elephants between them.
Ten nations have more elephants than Sri Lanka, but only Botswana, nine times the size of Sri Lanka, with 130,000 elephants, has more elephants per square mile.
Passing out shotguns
The Sri Lanka Ministry of Wildlife Conservation on January 13, 2020 responded to elephant/human conflict by distributing 2,000 shotguns to members of a 2,500-member volunteer cadre raised to deter elephant raids on crops.
The shotguns, an inefficient weapon against elephants, were supposedly to be used as noisemakers, to scare elephants away.
But the tactic reminded observers of the distribution of firearms to rural residents early in the 1983-2009 insurgency against the Sri Lankan government by the “Tamil Tigers,” a Hindu militia opposed to rule by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority.
Instead of quelling the rebellion, arming one part of the rural population against another expanded the conflict into sixteen years of fighting that killed at least 70,000 people.
Other wildlife added to hit list
Diverting farmer anger and frustration with elephants toward other species, “Animals such as monkeys, peacocks, grizzled giant squirrels, porcupines, wild boars, and toque macaques listed on the protected list have been removed,” announced then-agriculture minister Mahinda Amaraweera.
But that scarcely solved the problem.
Environment minister Dammika Patabendi on February 27, 2025 acknowledged the deaths of 1,195 humans and 3,484 wild elephants in elephant/human conflict between 2015 and 2024.
The Sri Lankan government paid $13,000 [U.S. funds] in compensation to human victims of elephant attacks over that time, spending approximately three times as much to dispose of elephant carcasses––a point noted by opposition legislator Nalin Bandara.
Electrified fences
‘We are allocating more money to reduce the human/elephant conflict,” Patabendi told the Sri Lankan parliament, pledging to “build more electrified fences and deploy additional staff to help reduce elephant raids on villages near wildlife sanctuaries,” Agence France-Presse reported.
According to the July 9, 2024 edition of the Daily Mirror of Sri Lanka, “The implementation of over three hundred community-based paddy field electric fences contributed to a reduction in both human and elephant fatalities in 2024—the first such drop in nine years.”
Despite that success, the chief non-lethal government response, time and again, has been organising “elephant drives” by hundreds of villagers at a time, undertaken in repeatedly unsuccessful and risky efforts to chase elephants back into wildlife reserves.
Elephant drives “completely failed”
Ten elephant drives “completely failed” between December 2024 and March 2025, the Daily Mirror of Sri Lanka recounted, “and the people in the drive villages now complain of increased raiding by elephants.”
A succession of Sri Lankan governments representing different political parties have also continued issuing guns.
Ceylon Today journalist Thusini Gajanayake on March 27, 2025 reported that, “A total of 13,207 firearms had been issued to farmers for crop protection as of December 31, 2024, according to revelations made in Parliament.”
Elephant hospital & mobile medical unit pledged
But elephants tend to become even more dangerous when wounded, and attract public sympathy when they fall.
Environment minister Dammika Patabendi, “during a visit to the Polonnaruwa Wildlife Zone, inspected a critically injured tusker suffering from a gunshot wound to his right leg,” The Morning of Sri Lanka reported on July 7, 2025.
Patabendi then “announced plans to establish a wildlife hospital and a mobile medical unit dedicated to treating elephants, in response to a spike in wild elephant shootings,” The Morning of Sri Lanka said.
Meanwhile, charged the Daily Mirror of Sri Lanka, “In the name of eradicating rural poverty, the current government is set on stoking the flames of human-elephant conflict, pushing both humans and elephants from the frying pan into the fire.”
Champa Fernando recommends
Champa Fernando recommends empowering the Department of Wildlife Conservation “with sufficient veterinarians, other personnel, equipment, and vehicles, using the mega-money generated by the largely wild elephant-centered eco-tourism industry;
“Releasing the wild animal habitats taken over by successive governments to gain votes to remain in power;
“Establishing wild animal corridors, including overpass and underpass wild-animal crossings at vulnerable rail-track points,” to prevent train/elephant collisions such as those that killed seven elephants on February 20, 2025, and another on May 20, 2025;
“Making the people of elephant conservation areas stakeholders in wild animal-centered ecotourism ventures, so they too will benefit economically [from the presence of elephants and other wildlife] and will become on-location protectors of wild animals; and
“Implementing the law against the perpetrators [of elephant shootings] who are currently acting with impunity.
“Remember,” Fernando’s petition finishes, “if we generate enough money from tourism, we can import any commodity, but not our unique and precious fauna and flora.”
by Merritt Clifton
aNIMALS 24/7
from The Island https://ift.tt/eO9b1jQ
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