ANNOUNCEMENTS
The Wayanad district in Kerala is regularly in the news for high levels of Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC), arguably a subset of human-elephant interactions (HEI), all of which are not negative. But more important than “conflict” is perhaps local people’s perceptions of these interactions, which are influenced by different social, political and ecological factors in a particular region. A socio-political and ecological framework is used to understand HEI in Wayanad, derived from Thekaekara’s (2019) study of human-elephant interactions in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. This framework is applied in the adjacent South Wayanad Forest Division and tries to understand and analyse the various factors that influence HEI. The factors that were studied in this thesis are: laws and policies relating to the human-wildlife interface; agriculture patterns; natural cover; human density and distribution; elephant density and distribution; diversity in human tolerance to elephants; diversity in elephant behaviour; conservation conflict between stakeholder groups; on-ground HEI and mitigation measures. Data for each of these factors were collected using a mixed methods approach: using secondary data and literature search, open-ended stakeholder interviews, and GIS mapping. It was found that a number of factors were important in influencing HEI and people’s perceptions of them. Agriculture patterns were perhaps the most important, with large areas of palatable crops such as banana and areca nut, unlike inedible plantation crops such as tea and coffee. Conservation conflict between groups of people was comparatively high. Human density was high with widespread distribution, while elephant densities and distribution were comparatively low. There was significant variation in many of these factors in different sites within the study region. These results show an in-depth understanding of the underlying context of human-elephant interactions is vital in allowing for elephants to persist outside protected areas and minimising HEC and allowing for localised solutions.
