By Teguh Suprayitno
TEBO, Indonesia — Electrified fences set up around farms are an emerging threat to the critically endangered Sumatran elephant, conservationists told Mongabay Indonesia following a series of deaths this year in Aceh and Jambi provinces.
Wishnu Sukmantoro of the Indonesian Elephant Conservation Forum (FKGI), a Sumatra-based nonprofit, said the death of a Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus) in Jambi’s Tebo district in May was likely caused by an electric fence, the first reported case in the province.
“This is very dangerous, because the electric current can be deadly,” Wishnu told Mongabay Indonesia.
In early May, the female elephant was found dead near the boundary of an oil palm farm in Tebo’s Bukit Pemuatan village. The elephant, estimated to be between 25 and 35 years old, was discovered around two days after it had died on the privately owned farm, which lies in a forest concession managed by a subsidiary of rubber producer PT Royal Lestari Utama (RLU), a unit of the Michelin Group.
Sumatran elephants part of a conservation program to reduce human-wildlife conflict in Sumatra. Image by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.
Officers from the Jambi office of Indonesia’s conservation agency, known as the BKSDA, forestry ministry law enforcers known as Gakkum, and local police seized inverters and batteries from the scene.
The dead elephant was known to conservationists as Umi, the mother of several calves from Jambi’s Bukit Tigapuluh area. Umi had been fitted with a GPS collar by the BKSDA in February this year. On May 1, Umi and her herd of around 35 elephants were spotted near the private farm. The farm owner, identified only as a 58-year-old civil servant, was found to have cut off the GPS collar after Umi died. He later returned the GPS collar to BKSDA staff.
“This has happened before in other places. Most recently it happened in Aceh,” Wishnu told Mongabay Indonesia, referring to Indonesia’s westernmost province and home to the country’s largest remaining elephant population.
In February, Mongabay Indonesia reported on the death of an elephant in Aki Neungoh village, in Aceh’s Pidie Jaya district. In a written statement, Gunawan Alza, the head of the Aceh BKSDA, attributed the animal’s death to an electric fence surrounding community plantation land.
“The elephant’s right front leg and body were entangled in electric wires,” Gunawan said, adding the animal was thought to have been around 13 years old.
In October 2017, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry reported that two elephants were killed in East Aceh district after contact with an electric fence.
Separately, local media in Aceh reported in 2022 that police in Southeast Aceh district had charged three men in connection with the death of an elephant, apparently following contact with an electric fence the men had installed around farmland.
Mongabay couldn’t confirm if the animals died as a result of being ensnared by the wiring, a common means of trapping wild animals, or if the electric current alone was the cause of death.
A rainforest in Jambi. Once heavily forested, the province has lost more than 40% of its tree cover since 2000. Image by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.
Electrified fences have emerged as an increasingly common tool in countries with elephant populations to prevent herds trampling through human settlements and farms, with mixed results. In Sri Lanka, the country’s Wildlife Conservation Department estimates that almost 300 elephants have been electrocuted since 2018. In Kenya, meanwhile, electric fences have proved beneficial in reducing conflicts with maize farmers, according to 2018 research by Liudmila Osipova, a Ph.D. researcher at Bangor University in Wales.
Elephants often do their best to solve problems created by humans. In Kenya, for example, some elephants learned they could use their tusks, which don’t conduct electricity, to take down electric fences. The Kenya Wildlife Service responded by authorizing the removal of tusks from elephants in Lewa Wildlife Conservancy.
In 2019 an Indian forestry ranger recorded a video of an elephant approaching an electric fence and cooly using its trunk to dismantle the wooden pole supporting the wire, before continuing on its way.
Tusk-oriented
The most recent assessment by the FKGI, which Mongabay obtained in 2022, estimated a total remaining population of 924-1,359 Sumatran elephants.
The Indonesian government has not published an official population report since 2007, which estimated 2,400-2,800 individuals — but even that range was based on field surveys conducted in the early 2000s.
Around 40% of the remaining Sumatran elephants are believed to live in forests in the semiautonomous province of Aceh, while the remainder are found in old-growth forests hemmed in by plantations and human settlements in Jambi, Lampung and Riau provinces.
The population of Sumatran elephants in Bukit Tigapuluh National Park, which straddles the border between Riau and Jambi provinces, is estimated to be 120. Of those, 80% frequently roam outside the conservation area, including in community plantation areas and the rubber concession operated by the Michelin subsidiary.
In 2010, the RLU subsidiary obtained a 61,495-hectare (151,957-acre) plantation permit to the south of Bukit Tigapuluh National Park, which had previously been operated by PT Industries et Forest Asiatiques.
Baby Sumatran elephant. Image by Rhett Butler / Mongabay.
The company fenced off 9,700 hectares (24,000 acres) in 2018 as a conservation area. However, encroachment into this protected zone has persisted, and at the time of writing only around 2,800 hectares (6,900 acres) remained forested.
From 2008-2017, more than 189,000 hectares (467,000 acres) of rainforest in the buffer area of Bukit Tigapuluh National Park were lost, leading to an increase in conflicts between elephants and humans. Reported incidences of conflict increased from 277 in 2019 to 314 in 2021, according to FKGI records.
FKGI data also showed that at least 700 Sumatran elephants have died due to poisoning or poaching in the past decade. Population clusters of Sumatran elephants in Indonesia decreased from 44 groups in 1985 to 25 in 2007. Moreover, only 12 of these groups comprised herd populations greater than 50 elephants, the civil society organization noted.
Pole volts
In 2011, the Sumatran elephant’s conservation status on the IUCN Red List worsened to critically endangered amid a sustained population decline, with the new assessment reflecting that “over 69% of potential Sumatran Elephant habitat has been lost within just one generation.”
Mongabay has previously reported on the struggles farmers in Jambi and Aceh face in managing conflicts with elephants. Local farmers operating on low margins and increasingly higher input costs can face ruin if a herd of elephants tramples through their planting area.
However, research in Sumatra has over decades documented the threat to the remaining population from the decreasing habitat available.
Every day an adult elephant requires around 180 liters (45 gallons) of water and 150-250 kilograms (330-550 pounds) of food. Elephants also require a roaming area of around 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres). If these needs can’t be met, then elephants will encroach into human farmland.
“It is impossible for elephants to enter the national park, because of the highlands,” Hefa Edison, head of the Elephant Conservation Information Center in Tebo, told Mongabay in 2023. “They will keep running into the community plantations.
The FKGI’s Wishnu said installation of electric fences had become more common since 2021 as farmers in Sumatra sought to prevent herds trampling through their farmland. The electric fence that reportedly caused Umi’s death ran some 20 kilometers (12 miles) around the farm.
However, Wishnu said the fencing wasn’t legal and that charges should be brought in the case to deter the use of the tool across Sumatra.
Maryono, the local police chief, said his office had received a report of Umi’s death but that the case would be handled by the BKSDA.
“We have no authority to handle this case,” he said when contacted on May 18.
A community rubber plantation in Sumatra, the world’s sixth-largest island. Image by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.
Attempts to contact Donal Hutasoit, the head of the Jambi BKSDA, by telephone and WhatsApp messages were not successful. Faried, the regional conservation lead for the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, declined to comment, citing a ban on officials speaking with journalists.
Badi’ah, the species conservation lead at the ministry’s Directorate General of Nature Resources and Ecosystem Conservation, didn’t respond to questions via WhatsApp.
RLU, the Michelin subsidiary, told Mongabay it didn’t have information regarding the electric fences installed around community farms, and that an internal investigation was underway.
“As a concession holder, we manage the work area according to permits given by the government and report any potential violations,” RLU wrote in an email to Mongabay on May 17.
“We have held meetings with small farmers and met many times with the authorities to discuss priority matters.”
The office of the spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment and Forestry didn’t reply to a request for comment.
This story was reported by Mongabay’s Indonesia team and first published here on our Indonesian site on May 27, 2024.
Citation:
Mutinda, M., Chenge, G., Gakuya, F., Otiende, M., Omondi, P., Kasiki, S., … Alasaad, S. (2014). Detusking fence-breaker elephants as an approach in human-elephant conflict mitigation. PLOS ONE, 9(3), e91749. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0091749
This article was originally published on Mongabay
