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The devoured crops and damaged homes in Xishuangbanna are the prefecture's biggest source of insurance claims, said Zhang Li, an ecology professor at Beijing Normal University involved in elephant conservation policy.Īnd they killed at least 41 people between 20, Zhang said. Increasingly, filling up means a raid on a local farm.Įlephants inflict an estimated 20 million yuan ($3 million) in annual economic losses. Weighing up to four tons, they consume as much as 200 kilogrammes (440 pounds) of food daily. "Compared to when we were kids, there are more baby elephants in the herds now," Ma said. With no natural enemies, the population has doubled to more than 300 and counting. Ironically, successful conservation is partly to blame.Īsian elephants, which range across South and Southeast Asia, were nearly exterminated within China, leaving only around 150 in Xishuangbanna by the 1980s.Ĭonservationists say a 1988 hunting ban and strict protection of a sprinkling of fragmented elephant reserves has turned things around. But there is conflict now," Ma said dryly. Still, they regularly find their way in, putting the village in lockdown until the potentially dangerous trespassers wander out, usually after raiding fruit and vegetable gardens. The village of rubber-tappers is entered through a wide steel gate that clangs shut at night, when hunger activates the elephants.
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The neatly ordered homes of the little community, called Xiangyanqing, climb up a gently sloping hillside, dotted by signs promoting human-elephant "harmony" and encircled by a steel fence separating it from adjacent jungle. The tension is immediately apparent in Ma's village in Xishuangbanna, a subtropical prefecture the size of a small country where China's elephant population congregates.