Asia's Elephant Wars

NEAR MIDNIGHT, as the village slumbers, Goonda slips out of the forest like a one-man commando unit. He smashes through the rock-hard rear wall of Lilo Das's house and snatches a sack bulging with milled rice. Women and children flee, screaming. Das and other men grab homemade bamboo spears and torches. Guards fire shots into the air.

But Goonda, "the hoodlum," cannot be stopped. Amid din and flames, he rams into a village shrine, then demolishes half of a second house, nearly trampling a sleeping family of seven. The hulk next powers his way into the kitchen of a third house, pilfering food readied for a New Year's festival. After an hour-long rampage, he finally vanishes into the hills.

Now the village of Panbari in India's northeastern state of Assam resembles the eerie aftermath of battle. Villagers point to crumpled walls, toppled fences, a corrugated iron roof knocked askew, a grove of felled banana trees--all the work of a single elephant. "We hope he doesn't come again tonight so we can sleep in peace," says Das wearily.

A place of poor farmers and petty traders, Panbari is on the frontlines of a heart-rending war, one that's being waged in villages, fields and plantations regionwide between onetime friends--land-hungry man and simply hungry Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant. The conflict is unlikely to end in an amicable peace treaty. In all 13 Asian nations where elephants are still found, mushrooming human populations mean shriveling habitat for elephants, as well as heightened conflict between people and animals. In Indochina--where elephant losses are most dramatic--hunting, particularly for the ivory trade, is also decimating the species. "Over the past few years, around 5,000 wild elephants--about 10 percent of the remaining population--have been killed in Asia," says Elizabeth Kemf, an Asian elephant expert for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "Meanwhile, hundreds of people have lost their lives as humans and elephants fight over space."

The origin of today's crisis is not hard to fathom, and one country, Thailand, is a typical example. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with some 90 percent of its land under forest cover, Thailand could harbor an estimated 300,000 wild and captive elephants. One hundred years later, the human population has soared from fewer than 8 million to 63 million, and the green canopy has shrunk to less than 20 percent of its former area. According to Kemf, wild elephant numbers have also plunged--to just 2,000. Even so, the nation's devastated forest habitat is inadequate to house and feed the animals that remain.