Irony of Tanzania facing elephant numbers crisis after beating poachin

From Mtwara to Kagera in several corners of the country, at one instance being a youth tending goats in the bush and following up on an animal that had meandered too far in the bush. An elephant spotted the child and set upon him, crushing him to his death, itself typical of such attack incidents.

In other places no lives were lost but farms put to ruin as elephants seeking water or grass trampled on the farms, since at times animals in the bush and settlements nearby use proximate ponds or streams as source of water. The reason is midway between having more elephants coming close to settled areas and thus causing mayhem, and increased economic activities arising from population growth, which reduces the margins of land separating settlements and reserved areas. There is even a difficulty in regulations of game controlled areas, of who habits the land.

It is not clear if the government has a direct way of solving the problem, as habitually it doesn’t compensate people whose crops are destroyed by animals, though at times there are intimations that the government is ready to do so. At one time in the legislature a question was put to the government that peasants should be able to kill (or harvest, in technical terms) crocodiles as they attack people fetching water or crossing small bridges in isolated rural areas, and the government refused. There are explanations on government trophies or informing wildlife officials, etc.

While the chaos that arises in villages when there are elephants nearby is not that new to village life as a whole, the irony is that the country has tasked itself plenty as well as engaging international conservation organisations to control poaching. While there are undeniable successes in that sphere, irony has it that people start regretting that anti-poaching efforts have been so successful that elephants find their own habitats insufficient, and start expanding on settlements. Many among conservationists would say that the opposite is the case, but in the final analysis it is people who make land use planning, not elephants, in which case it is an error on the part of conservation authorities not to be aware that elephants are too close to villages, not the other way round. Can there be a debate on land occupancy, here?

So far there haven’t been clear reactions from concerned wildlife conservation agencies what they are doing about controlling elephant populations from invading settled areas, one reason being that conservation bodies are more concerned with protecting elephant herds than farms nearby. While issues of compensation surface in these instances of elephants marauding settlements, the crucial issue isn’t that aspect but how to actually separate the presence of large animals in the vicinity of villages. That is true for visible large beats like elephants or those hiding under water like crocodiles, as in the final analysis villagers have little use of them.

When complaints surface all over the place about animals marauding settlements or injure those conducting herding or farming in the vicinity of game controlled areas generally (including national parks or game reserves) it means there is a relative breakdown of wildlife work. The job of these bodies isn’t just to protect wildlife from poachers or random killings but also ensure that people are safe from them. Being attacked by elephant is a human rights intrusion, by gross negligence.