Competition for Resources between Humans and Elephants: Lessons Learned from Coimbatore, India

By: Emma Dixon
July 2019 Trip to Coimbatore, India

Born and raised in Kansas, the breadbasket of the United States, where the main pests’ farmers worry about are insects, rodents and birds, I could never have imagined researching human elephant conflict.

 A coconut farm in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. It takes more than 20 years for the coconut trees to reach this height and provide consistent yield. Several trees can be damaged in during an elephant raid.

Human elephant conflict (HEC) is the competition for shared resources that is mainly a result of the fragmentation and degradation of the Asian elephant’s habitat. This can often lead to a lack of food, water and space for the elephants.

India, home to a majority of Asian elephant population, witnesses several HEC incidents annually that results in both human and elephant casualties.

An employee at the local temple describes how elephants
access the water in the tank. This footprint was left
by an elephant only few hours before we visited this temple.

The farmers in and around Coimbatore, a city in Southern India has taken the brunt of the consequences as elephants commonly raid certain crops like coconut, plantain, sorghum, maize (corn), and areca nut for food, and other cash crops trampled.

Having their crops eaten by elephants causes great economic damage to the farmers who rely on their crops to support their families.

By talking to the farmers and villagers impacted by HEC and seeing the physical barriers they have built to protect their crops and properties, my understanding of this multidimensional issue grew.

There are so many different stakeholder viewpoints, some of the farmers viewing the elephant with understanding/respect and others with fear/dislike.

Learning more of the factors that have created this problem and could lead to its solution will take time, but I know that everything I learn through this project can be used on future issues that require an interdisciplinary solution.

With the villagers who described their experiences with elephant raids.

I plan to visit this area in near future and collect more data to further my understanding of this problem.  My future research and subsequent publications will allow the scientists and policymakers working on solutions to HEC to understand the issue in greater depth.

Human-Elephant Conflicts: A graduate student’s experiences in India

By: A. Nicole Reed
July-August 2017 Trip to Coimbatore, India

As I stepped off the plane in Coimbatore, India, I never imagined it would change my perceptions of the world any more than it had three years ago. This would be my second time in India and I thought I knew what to expect. Everything from the food and smells to what local farmers were experiencing on their land. However, each day was a new experience filled with new information and lessons learned.

Collecting stakeholders input on human-elephant conflict
in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India (August 2018)

This trip was for collecting data on people’s experiences and opinions about elephants raiding crop fields in and around Coimbatore District which will be part of my master’s thesis project. I traveled to small villages near and away from the forested areas and spoke to farmers about the conflicts they were experiencing with elephants. I visited these villages with my thesis adviser and faculty members from two colleges in Coimbatore. We interviewed about 100 farmers and other stakeholders and learned the difficulties they face to protect their crops and make a living. I also learned which mitigation efforts are more effective than others.

With students, staff and faculty at Kongunadu A&S College, Coimbatore (August 2018)

I stayed at two different colleges and met many people of different backgrounds and was fortunate to take part in a river festival with one of the college official’s families. This experience helped me better understand the culture in India and allowed me to make lasting relationships with many.

There were several opportunities for myself as well as my project to develop further, perhaps though, my biggest take away from this trip was the need for communication among professionals across disciplines as well as internationally. I was also asked to present on wildlife and land management in the United States. The exchange of information available could help us work toward solving global issues such as human-wildlife conflicts. This type of communication would allow each of us to learn from each other quickly and create better, well informed, decisions. Overall, my time spent in India was useful on several levels and allowed me to collect my data as well as learn more about the culture and history of the area. 

Anne Nicole Reed wins second place in the 2016 Best Undergraduate Research Projects award

Anne 'Nicole' Reed won second place in the Best Undergraduate Research Project award in 2016 Wyoming Undergraduate Day for her human-elephant conflict research in India. UW's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) selected three student presentations to honor excellence in UW undergraduate Research. Nicole shared second place with another student Roslyn Fleming (English Honors Program).

Nicole presented her research findings and insights she gained from the field trip to India. After completing the literature-based research in spring 2015 on human-elephant conflict, she traveled to India in summer 2015 with Alanna Elder (BS Agroecology & ENR) to gain first-hand information about this problem, and how people and elephants are tolerating each other.

These prizes, according to Dr. Rachel Watson, were offered to research presentations that showcased the "interfaces between science and the human condition addressed in a nuanced way that shows understanding and not simply consideration".

Dr. Watson and a panel of judges reviewed 270 abstracts and selected 9 semi-finalists. Judges attended each of these 9 presentations and selected three winners. Nicole received this award at the banquet on April 30, 2016.

Human-elephant conflict: an experience with stakeholders in Southern India

Alanna Elder
August 2015 trip to Coimbatore, India


During the spring of 2015, I took the Environmental Policy, Conservation and Development in India. The class provided a snapshot of environmental challenges in India, and then we chose topics for individual study. I began a literature review of human – elephant conflict and spent the next three months in Laramie getting lost in the library’s database; in the vastness of India; in a problem that puzzles land managers around the world. By the end of the semester, I had a paper that I thought was accurate and an understanding that was almost tangible because I dug for it. I doubted, however, whether everything I had read would check out on the ground. In order to confirm that what I wrote was real, I wanted to see humans, elephants, and their overlapping territories in real dimensions.

Nicole and Alanna visited a corridor frequently
used by the elephants to obtain water

Thanks to funding from the College of Agriculture’s SEND program, and the Haub School for Environment and Natural Resource’s Research and Creative Activities grant, I was able to do just that.

I traveled to Coimbatore, India in August 2015 with Dr. Sivanpillai, ENR professor Courtney Carlson, and Nicole Reed, a classmate who had researched crop raiding by elephants.

There we met two faculty members from Kongunadu Arts and Sciences College, Drs. S. Raja (Zoologists) and K. Thenmozhi (Botanist). They guided us to farms and forest offices and provided insight into elephant behavior and the effects of invasive plants on elephant habitat.

Coimbatore Forest District is a hot zone for the human-elephant conflict in the state of Tamil Nadu, and includes agricultural plains as well as the rain forest reserves of the Western Ghats.

Farmers use these observation decks for monitoring elephant movement

Forest Department reports Dr. Raja had acquired showed that one range within the district had the highest rates of crop raiding, so that was where we started. Our conversations with farmers, officials and scientists sometimes echoed verbatim what we had read, or even cited articles we recognized. Still, these perspectives were fuller coming from people with a stake in the problem. The broken fences were theirs, and the trampled crops. Some had the memory of meeting an elephant, a reverence for the animal, a home to keep or a landscape to preserve.

Nearly everyone we talked to attributes the problem to habitat loss, as city borders continue to expand into forests formerly dominated by wildlife. The farmers we met made clear the choices of people living along the forest boundary, who would attempt to protect crops with trenches, fences, or night guarding. Some had switched from high-sucrose plants to curry, which elephants don’t generally touch. Others had given up farming altogether.

Inside a brick kiln in Coimbatore

A tribal woman living along an elephant corridor told us that she and her family had quit growing beans to work in a brick kiln. We could spot its tongue of smoke in the valley below her home. Thirty years ago, she had only seen elephants on occasion, and from a distance. Now, they pass her house almost daily. She said, “Where else can they go?”

Another family we visited had lost five coconut trees in two weeks. In one field, they showed us a trunk rubbed smooth by an elephant trying to uproot the tree. Nearby a tree was grounded, carved out of the kernels elephants tend to eat. The couple had electric fencing (not entirely elephant proof) around a different field, but chose to leave this one open, knowing that wildlife in the area were stressed for water. Who were they to stand in the way of survival?

Survival was an idea we heard throughout the trip, and it became increasingly hard to pin down. It is a motive, a reality, an apology – it is a force that puts every living thing in conflict with something else. According to the family, a man was harvesting dirt illegally from the land adjacent to their farm, selling soil to buy his food. Behind this field with the toppled coconuts, there was a slow-growing cavern in the scrub. The papers I read could not have shown me what survival looked like.

The human-elephant conflict that is changing India and the research that shaped our summer

Anne Nicole Reed

August 2015 trip to Coimbatore, India

This summer I had the opportunity to travel to India to learn about the human-elephant conflict. This trip was a follow up to the spring ENR policy course in which we studied policy related decisions in Southern India. After looking at many subjects Alanna Elder, Dalton Nelson, and I chose to work on the ongoing human-elephant conflict. The papers we wrote on this subject were the beginning stages of our research in India. We focused our efforts in Southern India along the Western Ghats mountain range.

This trip was an eye opening experience, I not only was fortunate enough to learn about the elephant issues in this region and what they are doing to remedy this, but I also learned about their culture which I think is a large aspect to solving any human wildlife conflicts.

In Southern India there are many conflicts that occur between the wildlife and humans, however, one of the largest that has been escalated since the 1980s is the human-elephant conflict.

Although there has continually been conflict between the two, in the 1980s began large-scale human expansion into the elephant habitat.

The crop damage or crop loss has been substantial on a local level which is the true source of frustration for the farmers. Both elephants and humans have lost their lives in this conflict.

While in India we visited with many farmers and locals to better understand the situation from this aspect but we also visited with forestry officials and scientists to also receive it from an official stand point.

Gaining a better understanding of the problem:
one perspective at-a-time. Farmers describe
how elephants destroy their crops.

By speaking with many different people it was easy to see how split people are on this subject and why it can be difficult to find long standing solutions.

While I enjoyed learning from the many people we met I believe my favorite aspect to this trip was getting to know the locals and being able to have in depth conversations with them because this adds another layer to the research that you would otherwise not have if just basing the research on literature.

I am thankful for this opportunity and plan to travel to this area again if given the opportunity.

Alanna Elder and Nicole Reed (right) observe the elephants in their feeding camp.

I believe this trip was well worth the effort and I look forward to furthering my studies with Dr. Sivanpillai through working with the Konganadu College of Arts and Science on the elephant crop destruction. This study not only has helped me on an educational level but a personal level as well. 

Anne Nicole Reed and Alana Elder present their human-elephant conflict research at URD 2015

Anne Nicole Reed (Wildlife Biology & Fisheries Management major & ENR minor), and Alana Elder (Agroecology major and ENR minor) presented their human-elephant conflict research in the 2015 Undergraduate Research Day (May 1, 2015 - Laramie, WY).

Their research was focused on identifying the causes of human-elephant conflicts and its impacts on agriculture in and around Coimbatore, India. This area is part of the Western Ghats which is designated as one of the biodiversity hotspots. Increase in the number of human-elephant conflicts since early 1980s can be attributed to reasons such as human encroachment leading to habitat fragmentation and decline in the quality of elephant habitat.

A Review of Human-Wolf Conflicts in India

Event: WY Undergraduate Research Day, Laramie, WY
Date: April 26, 2014

Nathan Newman, Ryan Parker and Cali Woodbury presented an overview of the ongoing human-wolf conflicts in India.

Their research focused on the reasons behind why wolves are leaving their protected habitats and prey on cattle, sheep, and other livestock resulting in human-wolf conflicts.

They also discussed how this conflict poses challenges to the wolf conservation efforts, because of perceived livestock loss, among other reasons, has created intolerance toward the wolf, and they are thus viewed as a threat to animal husbandry. They reviewed several case studies, research papers, and the 1994 EIS on the reintroduction of the grey wolf as part of this research.