A long-term intervention run and designed by the Assam government and environmental NGO World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to reduce crop devastation by elephants in its forest areas is actually linked to more accidental deaths of elephants, according to a study. conservation Biology Have reported.

Launched in Sonitpur district in 2003, Assam’s Anti-Robbery Squad (ADS) worked with local villagers and the forest department to protect their farms and drive away elephants en masse. The purpose of the squads was to seek safety for humans while avoiding direct conflict that could result in elephants being killed by snaring or poaching. Versions of this type of security exist around the world.

Assam increased ADS presence in 2008 and continues to launch new squads today. They are part of the official national guidelines to deal with human-elephant conflict and are also present in West Bengal, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. one 2019 Review Regarding various ways of responding to human-elephant conflicts, the Union Environment Ministry stated that ADS operations were “not systematic” and that their effectiveness was reduced by “local mobs” opening fire on elephants.

Using 20 years of data on elephant deaths in Sonitpur, mapped over this period to villages in the region with the presence of ADS, the study found an approximately 2–3-fold increase in accidental elephant deaths associated with villages that did not have ADS compared to villages that did not have ADS. The elephants did not die due to direct conflict with villagers, but were found in ditches or ditches, killed by electric shock, or had fallen into the path of oncoming trains. The study showed that there was no apparent effect on human mortality.

Nitin Sekar, lead author of the study, said the results contradicted their original hypothesis: “We were all prepared for evidence that there would be no effect on mortality. We were expecting it to reduce human and elephant mortality. But this was a surprise.”

Mr. Shekhar began the analysis when he was the National Lead for Elephant Conservation at WWF-India, with the idea of ​​statistically pinpointing the impact of ADS. He is now a director at Conservation X Labs.

E. Somanathan, professor at the Economics and Planning Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, and head of the Research Center on Economics of Climate, Food, Energy and Environment, designed the statistical analysis in the study. He said the increase in deaths, although statistically conclusive, may not be directly apparent to people in the area, who believed the intervention had reduced elephant as well as human mortality.

“The whole purpose of WWF-India’s intervention is conservation, so they were not expecting this,” Mr Somanathan said.

Although the team was prepared for the fact that the data would not be good enough to draw any conclusions, they did not expect actual conclusions.

“The death rate from elephant conflict has increased by 200%,” Mr Somanathan said. “Doubling or tripling is a big impact. It’s such a big number that it requires careful examination of the program. The people driving away the elephants have to be relooked at. The program needs to think carefully about how it’s doing it.”

Although the study began in 2019, the authors added several controls to their data to account for other mitigating factors, causing it to take longer to be published.

‘Raises more questions’

“Although contrary to one of the hypotheses underpinning the ADS program, this finding is consistent with the concerns of many experts on human-elephant conflict,” the paper says.

Pranab Chanchani, head of species conservation, and Aritra Kshetri, national head of elephant conservation at WWF-India, however, cautioned that the link between elephant deaths and ADS actions is weak.

“The ADS study found a strong correlation between ADS ‘presence’ and elephant mortality data, and thus raises important questions about prevalent human-elephant conflict management strategies,” Mr Chanchani and Ms Chettri wrote in an email.

“But the ADS study also has several important shortcomings that limit direct attribution or causal inference, and so the study raises more questions than it answers.”

organized guarding

Assam is home to more than 5,000 wild elephants, the second largest population of large mammals in India. Sonitpur, in north-central Assam, is part of one of five priority scenarios for elephant conservation, as identified by the Elephant Task Force in 2010 – and is home to about 1.9 million people.

When WWF conceptualized the ADS in 2003, there was already a decades-long history of lost forest area, Mr. Chanchani and Ms. Chettri said. Elephants displaced from their habitat started inhabiting areas other than crop lands, tea gardens and the banks of the Brahmaputra river. Locals harassed and chased them, leading to increased mortality for both. WWF believed that if ADS conducted protection activities, it could reduce overall elephant mortality rather than leaving communities to fend for themselves.

ADSs were formed in villages where there had been recent incidents of crop raiding, encouraging the community to join hands with the widely distrusted forest department to deal with elephants. Each ADS had 10-15 male volunteers, who were provided with searchlights and firecrackers to keep the elephants away. Department officials collaborated with ADS and used information received from them to drive elephants away from farms.

However, according to the new study, the sound and light likely created a “fear landscape,” forcing the elephants to throw caution to the wind and wander into more dangerous situations.

“Although caution is warranted given the modest sample size in the field and the uncertain quality of postmortem data, these findings suggest that, in communities with ADS, elephants may be less likely to notice threats such as ditches, lethal wires or an oncoming train because they were too frightened or distracted by those chasing them (or perhaps even by a perceived greater likelihood of being chased),” the paper reads.

However, Mr Chanchani and Ms Chettri also cautioned that while data on elephant deaths is taken over several years, ADSs are only active during the harvest season, meaning some deaths may be falsely attributed to ADS activity. He also said that there is no ground truth in the study.

develop control

The study used 20 years of data collected by WWF-India’s ground team in Assam and human and elephant mortality data collected by the forest department. Given that the hypothesis was that ADS would reduce elephant mortality, the researchers attempted to rule out several alternative explanations.

The agricultural area within a village is more attractive to elephants as it provides more nutrition than foraging in forest areas. By adjusting this, the study could find out whether there was a higher than normal presence of elephants in the area. The second and third variables were the fraction of the area around the village made up of elephant habitat and the change in the distance from the village to areas accessible to elephants along elephant movement routes. The study also accounted for increases in human population and the intensity of light at night, a common proxy for the extent of evolution.

The researchers also took other variables into account. For example, ADS was more likely to be introduced in villages where there had been recent conflict incidents. Since human or elephant deaths are not so common in these incidents, another incident would be unlikely to occur so soon after the launch of ADS, as one incident would have just occurred. This may have been interpreted as a result of the ADS itself.

So in the analysis, the team excluded the year of ADS formation as well as the previous two years from comparing mortality rates in years with active ADS. When they found that the result was an increase rather than a decrease in elephant deaths, they simply excluded the year in which the ADS was formed from the comparison of mortality rates in years with active ADS. The result was the same, Mr. Somanathan explained.

Another bias they noted was under-reporting – because villagers generally had a poor relationship with the department. With ADS improving these relationships, it may be that the number of deaths remains the same and is now officially being overcounted. Even when the study included controls for potential undercount bias, there was still an overall increase in elephant mortality associated with ADS.

Due to a lack of data, the study was unable to tell whether ADSs are capable of protecting more crops than previously thought.

stop and check

Given the proliferation of anti-looting squads across India, the study raises serious concerns about the effectiveness of such interventions – and raises questions about why this result was not detected earlier.

“We are talking about 14 additional deaths in the same number of years,” Mr Shekhar said. “ADS remain active for months over the course of many years. The only way to detect this relationship is through statistics. It seems highly unlikely to me that anyone in the field would have detected this effect.”

Both Mr Shekhar and Mr Somanathan called for a re-evaluation of this and other interventions to reduce human-elephant conflict, including electrified fences and the use of sound and light in innovative ways.

“This is a good example of why we need more evaluation,” Mr. Shekhar said. “We should not rapidly expand an intervention without evaluating its impact. It is also generally ideal not to make any major policy decisions based on a single study. The best next step would be quick, rigorous evaluation of ADS by other groups.”

Mr Chanchani and Ms Chettri agreed that further study is needed – while noting that ADSs are also constantly evolving to match needs on the ground.

“We believe it would be prudent to adopt a strategy in which ADSs optimally improve their functions, particularly with respect to pursuit,” they wrote. “Until data to the contrary become available, we think the alternative (disorganized stalking) is unlikely to have better outcomes for people and elephants.”

Mridula Chari is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.