What if your next door neighbor was an elephant? Well, I don’t mean here in town. What if you lived next to a wildlife preserve and your neighbor was a family of elephants? African elephants get up to 11 feet high at the shoulder and can weigh almost 7 tons. That’s…that’s a whole lot of neighbor. They are the largest land animal and they have a diet to boot. They eat up to 660 pounds of food and drink up to 11 gallons of water every day.
This makes for very real problems for farming villages around the world. Take Hwange, a town in west Zimbabwe. The area is prone to drought so farmers have to be very careful about what they plant and how they cultivate it. But elephant populations have soared to 100,000! More and more, these massive creatures roam through fields and homesteads – sometimes destroying them by walking and sometimes munching on them until there’s nothing left.
What’s a farmer to do? Fences can be easily knocked down. Attacking or killing the elephants just makes the remaining elephants more aggressive and violent towards humans. Killing elephants is also poaching – against the law. One agency says they get 2,000 distress calls every year of humans endangered or killed by elephants. There are simpler solutions, of course. If you flash bright lights or make loud sounds or chase them with fire, elephants will tend to go away. But…over time the elephants get used to that and they aren’t scared off any more. You can guard your fields all day and all night or set up expensive surveillance equipment. Of course, no one can work 24/7 – especially subsistence farmers who barely get by.
Thinking over the situation, it’s easy to boil it down to a stark choice. Surely, one of them has to go: the humans or the elephants. One of them will conquer and one of them will lose. But in that small town in Zimbabwe, something different is happening. An organization called Tikobane Trust created something new. It’s this weird mixture of garlic, ginger, chiles, neem leaves, raw eggs, and cattle dung. It’s, well, it’s an elephant repellent. They pour it into small bottles that have holes in a simple fence around their fields. The elephants think it stinks and they stay away; they are unharmed. The farmers keep their crops, but they don’t have to sacrifice sleep or safety; they are unharmed. It’s a simple solution so that all may live.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant