Fuzz, p.6
Fuzz, page 6
Aritra points out his window as we pass a turnoff. “Two kilometers up that road a man was killed by an elephant. A few days ago. Three people were working on the roadway. They ran when they saw the elephant, and one man was separated, and the elephant followed him.”
This is hard for me to imagine. I grew up with Babar and National Geographic. Elephants were gentle and slow-moving. They wore spats and bright green suits. They were never something to fear. This has created a minor disconnect between myself and my hosts. Our first night on the road, we stayed at a government-owned bungalow in a teak forest just down the road from a sign marking an elephant crossing zone. The bungalow’s cook said he saw one near the gate the night before we arrived. My reaction to this piece of information was to announce my intention to go for a walk. It was around 7:00 p.m., two hours past the time when elephants head out in search of food and Dipanjan Naha and his cousin stop going near the forest.
“Don’t go very far, Mary,” said Aritra. We were sitting on the porch, drinking tea under the geckos and moths. Aritra has a round head and a friendly, slightly giggly disposition. He slips easily from his role as Naha’s assistant to the more familiar role of younger cousin.
Naha didn’t like my plan, either. “Please be very careful.”
They looked at each other, and then they set down their cups and got up to accompany me.
We got as far as the railroad tracks at the end of the driveway. Naha said a few words about the history of the narrow-gauge railway in India. We stood for a few minutes, as though waiting for a train. Aritra toed the gravel between the ties. “Let’s go back inside.”
To better appreciate the danger of an unplanned elephant encounter, sit down with someone who investigates the deaths. Saroj Raj is the range officer for the Bamanpokhri Beat of the local forest division, where every year since 2016, someone has been killed by an elephant.
Officer Raj has come to Bamanpokhri’s blue-walled, one-room community hall—the site of today’s awareness camp—to talk to people and answer questions. So far it’s just me asking. The people who show up on time for an awareness camp, it seems, are the people who have to. Today that’s a group of schoolchildren in plaid uniforms and a half dozen rangers from local wildlife squads. Naha isn’t bothered. It’s Diwali—a holiday week—and it’s after lunch. “So they are sluggish to come.”
Officer Raj gives me the particulars of the most recent fatalities. He begins, each time, with the exact date. You get the feeling there’s a lot of paperwork. “Thirty-one October, 2018. Three workers in the road.” The spot we passed earlier. “Suddenly one elephant appeared.”
One can be scarier than many. Herds comprise females and young elephants, the peace-loving jumbos of my childhood. A loner is typically male, and males can be trouble. Bull elephants go through a periodic hormonal tumult called musth, during which their testosterone levels are as much as ten times higher than at other times. This gives them a competitive edge with other males and with the herd’s dominant matriarch, but also a degree of random volatility. The musth mood state ranges, in the words of Asian elephant specialist Jayantha Jayewardene, from “hyper-irritability” to “a charging or destructive tendency” toward other elephants, human beings, “and even inanimate objects.” Villagers know this. “The men tried to escape into the bushes,” says Officer Raj. “One person unfortunately fell down.”
Officer Raj supplies the detail Aritra was careful to omit. The elephant stepped on the man’s head. When you weigh 6,000 pounds, simply stepping or kneeling on a person—or, in the 1992 case of a riled circus elephant named Janet, performing a headstand upon the person—is an effective means of killing. But Officer Raj’s determination in this case, based on footprints and disturbances of the surrounding vegetation, was that the death was accidental.
“Sixteen October, 2016. Also an accident.” A man was climbing up a riverbank when he encountered an elephant. “It was slippery,” recalls Officer Raj. “Both slid down the bank. The elephant just rolled over him.” Elephants sometimes kill the way cars kill: by being large and running into—or over—something much smaller. (Elephant keepers try not to get between a wall and an elephant.)*
“These elephants were not in the intention to kill,” Officer Raj says. How does he know? Because the bodies were in one piece. “If an elephant is in an angry mode, the body will not be intact. It will get in pieces.” A book by Jayantha Jayewardene includes a list of the nine recorded methods by which an angry or musth-addled elephant has killed a human being. “Placing a fore foot on one limb of the victim and ripping off the other with the trunk” is number 3. (Elephants use a similar anchor-and-pull technique to strip an uprooted shrub of limbs and leaves to eat.) Rulers of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 1600s were said to have taken advantage of this natural behavior, training elephants to serve as executioners. An engraving from An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon depicts an elephant so engaged. One forefoot rests on the malefactor’s torso, and the trunk is wrapped around the man’s raised left leg. Were it not for the caption (“An Execution by an Eliphant”) and the raggedly torn-off arm in the foreground, you could get the impression that Ceylonese monarchs trained elephants to serve as bodyworkers.
Naha’s awareness presentation will stress the importance of not upsetting an elephant. This is summed up by item 20 on the Best Practices for Mitigating Human-Elephant Conflict poster Aritra has just hung up on the wall of the community hall: “No Rambo-Style Action!” Shooting an elephant is not only illegal but, depending on the caliber of weapon, pointless. Our Janet withstood fifty-five shots from Palm Bay, Florida, police officers’ 9mm duty revolvers as well as the first round fired by an off-duty SWAT officer with a stash of ammo designed to penetrate armored personnel carriers. (The second round stilled her.)
The safe thing for a villager to do upon sighting an elephant or a herd in the area is to call the 24/7 hotline and let Officer Raj’s elephant squad handle it. The squad knows that elephants are social animals, so they stay calmer if they’re herded off the premises in a group. The rangers converge on them from the sides, like cowhands, and move the whole group in the direction of the forest out of which they’ve come. By now, the animals recognize the sound of the elephant squad vehicles. “We drive into the area, and they go.” Officer Raj smiles slightly. He’s not a smiley guy. “This is a convenience for us.”
Officer Raj makes elephant patrolling sound like mall security, but apparently it’s quite risky. A beat officer sitting with us has been charged four times. “They tell you not to run,” he says. “And I tell you, this is very hard to do when an elephant is coming straight at you!” My request for a ride-along is turned down, as is a second request. The expression on Officer Raj’s face suggests I’ve become a “nuisance event,” so I leave it.
Deaths, when they happen, tend to occur in the half hour or more it takes for the squad to arrive. Upon discovering elephants raiding their crops, villagers rush out of their homes, yelling, throwing stones, lighting torches and firecrackers.† A village may have freelance “elephant chasers” wielding spikes and carrying out other non–Best Practices. Bulls and dominant matriarchs may charge in defense, and normally placid females and calves may panic and stampede. In the dark of unlit fields and paddies, people stumble and fall and elephants are running blind and, as my mother liked to say, somebody’s going to get hurt.
“The elephant we can guide easily,” says Officer Raj. “To guide the people is the hard part. They are not in the condition to listen.” They’re upset, and that is understandable. Village farmers work hard and have little to show for it. A single Asian elephant may consume three hundred pounds of vegetation in a day. Between the raiding and the trampling, a small herd can quickly torpedo a season’s labor and livelihood.
An elephant among the crops is a powerful impetus to unwise action. Throw in the wobbly judgment and dimmed impulse control of inebriation, and the results can be dire, Naha says. He squats in front of a speaker, untangling a spaghetti heap of wires. “This is what we see. A group of people are drunk. Someone wants to be the hero, so he goes in front of the animal, harasses it, and that animal in self-defense …” Naha, too, avoids the verb kill, with its undertone of intent. “There is an accident.” By his own data, 36 percent of the people killed by elephants in North Bengal between 2006 and 2016 were drunk. Later, I would see this head-line in the Hindustan Times: “Drunken Man Challenges Elephants’ Herd, Trampled to Death in Jharkhand.” (Jharkhand borders West Bengal.) “He tried to fight with them,” a forest ranger told the reporter. “Them” was eighteen elephants.
Dangerously, an elephant also enjoys a snort. In North Bengal, elephants drink what the villagers drink: haaria, a home brew fermented and stored in quantities sufficient to inebriate an elephant. (Because elephants lack the main enzyme that breaks down ethanol, it takes less than you’d think.) According to Officer Raj, two things happen when elephants liquor up. Most just stumble away from the herd and sleep it off. But every herd seems to have an aggressive drunk—the matriarch, often, or a bull in musth. Whatever you do in this life, stay away from an inebriated bull elephant in musth.
There is data to support Officer Raj’s observations. In 1984, as part of a study at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, three Asian elephants “with no known history of alcohol use” and seven African elephants from Lion Country Safari were served a “large calibrated drum” of grain alcohol-laced water. The animals tended to wander off, away from the herd. They stood or leaned with their eyes closed or “wrapped their trunks about themselves.” They skipped meals. They didn’t bother to bathe. The matriarch became louder and more aggressive, as did a bull named Congo.
To discourage elephants from tippling, villagers may drag the hooch indoors. A terrible idea. Because now it is not drunk elephants they need to worry about, but elephants determined to become drunk—that is to say, elephants who smell booze inside the house and see no reason not to knock down a wall to get to it. In Naha’s survey, 8 percent of North Bengalis killed by elephants were sleeping inside their homes when it happened.
The chairs are mostly full now, and Naha takes up the microphone to begin his talk. He speaks in Hindi, of course, so Aritra translates, intermittently leaning over and cupping a hand to my ear to deliver a stand-alone sentence in a decisive, oracular cadence. “Being drunk, you should not go in front of the elephant.” “Always drive by the back side of the elephant.”
Naha is an expressive speaker with a lexicon of fluid hand gestures. I didn’t necessarily expect this. Offstage, there’s an economy of movement and words. He stands with shoulders squared and his feet angled outward as if to create a stable base. He’s like the man I keep seeing in the Ambuja Cement billboards, standing firm and unperturbed with an entire thundering hydroelectric dam in his arms. I’ve heard him say “I was once chased by a tiger” in the same workaday tone in which you or I might say “I was once in Omaha.”
The philosophy behind an awareness camp is simple. If you want to get through to people, talk to them while they’re relaxed and clearheaded. Sit them down and let Aritra serve them a cup of tea and a samosa. The more people understand about the biology of elephants and the behavior of herds, the safer the encounters. It mostly boils down to staying calm and giving the animals space. Especially mothers with calves, and even more especially, lone males, and extra-strength especially, males in musth. (Some hallmarks of musth, courtesy of Jayantha Jayewardene: profuse oozing from glands on the temples, frequent erections, and “fully opened ogling eyes with roving eyeballs.”)
There is another point worth emphasizing with people. Officer Raj mentioned it earlier, when we were chatting: “We the human beings, we are disturbing them.”
Awkwardly, this includes the actions of professionals like Officer Raj. Herding elephants into the nearest forest patch provides immediate benefits for the local villagers, but in the long run, Naha told me later, it aggravates the problem. Because it aggravates the elephants. They begin to associate humans with the anxiety and privation of being chased off when they’re trying to eat. They start to stand their ground. There are reports coming out of conflict regions in the neighboring state of Assam that say female elephants are starting to become as aggressive as bulls.
A better system, Naha believes, would incorporate sensors to detect the approach of a herd. A warning would go out to village heads and trained local response teams who would monitor the situation and try to intervene before crops are trampled and chaos erupts. Naha doesn’t mean motion sensors or heat sensors, both of which would be triggered by other mammals. He means seismic sensors: sensors triggered by vibrations so powerful only the footfall of an elephant (or a small earthquake) would have created them. Meanwhile, you do what you can to reduce the heavy footfall of humanity: keep working to restore forests and set aside preserves.
The assistant manager of the Gopalpur Tea Estate wears long, trim shorts of suit fabric and bulbous neon athletic shoes. His head is set at a backward tilt that makes him seem aloof, or maybe just in need of a new glasses prescription. He came to greet us as we drove in. An awareness camp for the workers, our second stop this week, is scheduled to begin in half an hour. But first, a cup of tea.
The assistant manager is a numbers man. The estate covers 1,200 acres, he says, placing cups in front of us. Two thousand one hundred workers collect the tea leaves. We listen and sip, and then he leads us back out the door and across the way, to an open-walled pavilion where Naha will be speaking.
The workers have already arrived. They look through the handouts that were placed on each chair inside a reclosable clear plastic bag (brand name: My Clear Bag). The women sit on one side, segregated from the men. Naha fiddles with the sound system, a holdover from the days before movie streaming, when the estate brought in live bands for weekend entertainment.
It’s hot and thickly humid. The tea estate managers are late. The workers fan themselves with Their Clear Bags. Time passes. Someone from the assistant manager’s house brings a tray. More tea! Ours is served in china cups with saucers. The workers sip from paper—tiny cups no bigger than a shot glass. WTF, I want to say, you’ve got twelve hundred acres of tea.
Here come the managers! SUVs arrive like squad cars, pulling up fast and braking hard. Doors open and slam, and the managers, five total, stride onto the scene. The workers rise from their seats in unison. Rather than joining Aritra and me in the audience chairs, the managers ascend to a row of tables on the stage. They crack open the water bottles that have been set at their places along with notepads and pens. There is a spectacular variety of mustaches up there on the stage.
The managers take turns with the microphone. Aritra yells his translations over the blast of dance hall speakers. The first manager urges the workers to pay attention, because we are near a river and a forest, and so we have elephant problems. He hands off the mic to the manager beside him, who outlines the estate’s present elephant deterrence strategy: a team that patrols on a tractor, lighting firecrackers as needed. The microphone continues its travels. The next manager is another numbers guy. In the twelve years he has worked here, seven or eight people have been killed by elephants.
At last the microphone is handed to Naha. The workers do in fact pay attention, so closely that I wonder whether there might be a penalty for looking away. The managers whisper with each other and peek at their phones in their laps. One takes a call, holding a hand over the device as if, like a burp, the behavior could thereby be made less rude.
When the presentation is over, Naha invites the workers to join in with questions and comments. One tea collector immediately rises from her chair. She is older than many, maybe fifty, and is dressed, like all the women, in the colorful, patterned sari she wears to work the tea plots. Aritra jumps up to bring her the mic, but she doesn’t need it. Her anger is an amplifier. The mustache showroom shifts in its seats.
Aritra resumes translating. “You tell us to change crops,” the woman says, referring to the small gardens kept by the workers. “From corn or rice to something like ginger or chilis, which elephants don’t like. But we grow corn and rice to feed ourselves. Also, once the tractor passes, the elephant is coming, coming, coming again. Elephants need a lot of food.” The woman sits down again. “We need different measures.”
She’s right, but good solutions are elusive. Measures that seem intuitively obvious are, in practical fact, limited—by their expense and by the new problems they create. Electric fencing is a for-instance. You need enough of it to keep the herds out, but not so much that it blocks their migrations. Maintaining and repairing long stretches of fencing is time-consuming and costly and often doesn’t get done. Or is done wrong. The voltage has to be high enough to discourage an elephant but not so high as to electrocute it. On average, fifty elephants a year are electrocuted in India.
And there is the considerable challenge of elephant intelligence. An Indian elephant, confronted with an electric fence, will likely soon figure out how to get past it without getting shocked. It will figure out that wood doesn’t conduct electricity. It will push down the posts or it will pick up a log and use it to press down the wires to let others step through.
