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The Elephant Next Door
Asian elephants are learning to live with us. But will we learn to live with them?
A male elephant steps over an electric fence on a moonlit night at the edge of Sri Lanka’s Kaudulla National Park. The island’s nearly 3,000 miles of electric fencing isn’t foolproof: Elephants often examine wires with their trunks or push trees onto fences and then step between the fallen wires.

In parts of India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, elephants jostle with people for space in an increasingly human-dominated landscape. Once, these supremely social animals ranged across Asia, into China and as far west as the Euphrates. Now an endangered species, Asian elephants hang on in only about 5 percent of their historic range.

Asia

ASIA

Nepal

MyanMAR

India

Bangl.

Laos

ThaiLAND

Camb.

SRI

LANKA

Malaysia

Borneo

Sumatra

Asian elephant

Elephas maximus

Indonesia

Asia

ASIA

Nepal

MyanMAR

India

Bangl.

Laos

ThaiLAND

Camb.

SRI

LANKA

Malaysia

Sumatra

Borneo

Indonesia

Asian elephant

Elephas maximus

Source: IUCN
Expanding cities and infrastructure fragment habitats, and invasive plants that crowd out their usual food sources may pose a further threat. Living peacefully with such an intelligent and adaptable animal requires a thorough understanding of its social structures, and the Asian elephant is far less studied by scientists than the African savanna elephant—especially in the wild. So over the past two decades, a dedicated group of researchers has been filling in these gaps, revealing an animal that’s different from its African cousins.
The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded Explorer Brent Stirton’s work around wildlife since 2016.

In the Wild

Highly adaptable, Asian elephants can live in various human habitats. They form close bonds and grieve dead relatives.

Young elephants in India’s Bandipur National Park throw dirt on themselves. This is a behavior they observed from their mothers to protect their skin from sun and insects.

There’s an emerging consensus that Asian elephants are highly intelligent, on par with species such as dolphins and chimpanzees. For instance, some have shown an awareness of their own body and mirror reflections, an exceedingly rare skill in the animal kingdom.

Not only that, they’re also very flexible, navigating a variety of habitats, from open grasslands to agricultural fields to tea plantations heavily used by people.

(Learn more about elephants’ “superpowers” in this animated video.)
Picture of an adult elephant touching its trunk to the back of a baby elephant in a grassy field

Born at around 200 pounds, calves (such as this one in India’s Bandipur National Park) rely on their mother’s milk for three years. Females remain with their herd for life, while males strike out on their own when they reach puberty.

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Picture of five elephants, one large, two medium-sized, and two small in a green forest. The largest elephant is touching its trunk to a small elephant’s back.

Near the Kahalla-Pallekele nature reserve in Sri Lanka, a female elephant touches a calf with her trunk while leading a group of young to water. Elephants take years to mature, all while observing adult behavior. Some juveniles help care for younger calves.

For a long time, scientists assumed Asian elephants had social structures similar to those of African savanna elephants. This was certainly true on the surface: Both long-lived species gather in herds of related adult females and calves, with males leaving the group during adolescence, when they’re eight to 13 years old.

But a key aspect of African savanna elephant society—that the oldest female, the matriarch, is the most dominant—doesn’t appear with Asian elephants. Instead, these pachyderms live in smaller, less hierarchical, and more loosely collected groups that can separate and reunite over time—a fluidity that allows them to adapt to rapidly changing resources.

(Explore more traits of African and Asian elephants in this interactive graphic.)

They’re also persistent in finding food, as illustrated by the preliminary results of a study in Thailand, in which more than half of wild elephants tested could use their trunks to open at least one door of a complex puzzle box to get fruit inside. Finding out more about how elephant minds work may help people learn how to live alongside their multi-ton neighbors, experts say.

(See how National Geographic has covered elephants for more than 100 years.)
Picture of a large group of elephants including adults and babies in golden light approaching a small body of water

Elephants drink from a lake near Galgamuwa, in northwestern Sri Lanka. With much of the country’s land developed, its estimated 6,000 elephants are forced to share almost 70 percent of their habitat with humans.

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An Uneasy Coexistence

Conflicts between people and elephants are common—and sometimes fatal for both.

Sumith Ranatunga, 44, was lucky to survive after being knocked off his motorcycle and trampled by an elephant in Galgamuwa in 2022. Still, he bears no ill will toward the animals, saying, “If we could return the forests to the way they were, we would not have this problem. It is we who have taken from the elephants.”

With possibly only about 50,000 wild Asian elephants left, including 30,000 in India, researchers and conservationists agree that if the species is to survive, people and elephants need to get along. And there’s still a long way to go.

From 2020 to 2022, people in Sri Lanka killed more than 1,100 elephants, and nearly 400 people died in elephant encounters. In India, from 2018 to 2020, 300 elephants and 1,400 people died because of human-elephant conflict, a phenomenon that occurs when habitat loss forces both species into close contact, often leading to injuries or death.

Picture of a man standing in a tree looking out into the distance. Behind him in the tree is a tent on a platform and a ladder to the ground

Upul Chataranga, 28, spends many nights a year in a lookout, guarding crops from elephants near Galgamuwa, Sri Lanka. When the animals approach, he begins shouting and lighting firecrackers, but this can make the animals more aggressive.

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Picture from above of many elephants in a field

A herd of dozens of wild elephants roams rice fields near the Kahalla-Pallekele nature reserve. Fallow fields ease human-elephant coexistence by allowing elephants to move from one place to another without prompting flare-ups with people.

Picture of a boy kneeling in a green grassy field next to and touching a dead young elephant

A boy in Galgamuwa gently touches a young elephant killed by a hakka pata, or “jaw bomb”—an improvised explosive concealed in edible bait. Hunters and farmers set these weapons to kill smaller animals for food, such as boars, but elephants often become victims, unable to eat and dying slowly of starvation.

Confrontational methods to deter elephants, such as using firecrackers or guns, are ineffective, and can both harm elephants and make them more aggressive, scientists find.

The only thing that works, experts say, is the electric fence. The often solar-powered structure for keeping elephants away from villages, gardens, or croplands delivers a gentle jolt to an animal that attempts to cross it. Yet in an arms race of sorts, the elephants are constantly testing their boundaries: using their trunks to investigate electrified wires or pushing trees onto fences and then stepping between the fallen wires.

Many large elephants and small, emaciated cows stand close together in a field with food scraps on the ground and mountains in the background

A group of male elephants feeds at a dump near Dambulla, Sri Lanka. The animals are drawn to nutrient-rich organic waste from the town’s markets. Many elephants, alerted by the sounds of vehicles, arrive at dumps just as garbage is being unloaded.

Picture of a man standing outside a brick house with a collapsed roof and walls

D.M. Premathilaka, 69, stands outside his ruined house in Kithuluthuwa village, in Sri Lanka. A large bull elephant looking for food knocked down a wall before being chased away by firecrackers. Sri Lanka’s wildlife authority compensates homeowners for damage caused by elephants, but it takes time and payment can be a little less than the cost of repairs.

Another solution is the early-warning system, in which the approach of an elephant sets off a bevy of warnings, from red beacons to text messages to voice calls, to notify locals to get inside until the animals have passed. This system has completely eliminated human deaths from elephant encounters for the past two years in Valparai, a region of tea plantations in southern India.

Picture of an elephant with chains around its ankles in gray morning mist leaning its head and trunk against a tree

A chained elephant leans against a tree to take weight off his legs at the Dubare Elephant Camp, in India. A popular tourist attraction, this government-run camp is for elephants used in logging or wild elephants that have been orphaned or have had repeated run-ins with humans.

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Reverence at a Price

Long revered as religious symbols, elephants are popular in festivals—but often suffer in captivity.

At Mysuru Palace in India, elephants touch trunks, perhaps a gesture of comfort. Festivals can be stressful for the pachyderms; the day before, these animals were among large crowds of people at the Dasara celebration.

People and elephants in Asia have a long, intertwined history. Seals from the Harappa civilization, over 4,000 years old, depict tamed elephants. With the advent of kingdoms and republics in India in the first millennium B.C., the elephant became prominent as an animal of war—used as a fighting platform and to charge enemy ranks—and remained so until a few hundred years ago.

After they stopped being used for war, the animals continued to be mainstays for activities such as transporting goods and logging.

Picture of a line of large elephants being ridden by men at night through ornate white arches lit with small white lights, surrounded by a large crowd holding up cell phones and one person holding a heart-shaped balloon

Beloved religious symbols in many Asian cultures, elephants are the highlight of the annual Dasara festival procession in Mysuru. They’re also icons of power long associated with royalty and known for their service in wartime and as beasts of burden.

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They are also rooted deeply in Asian religions: Buddhists believe the Buddha was once incarnated as a six-tusked white elephant, and Hindus worship an elephant-headed deity named Ganesha. Many temples in southern India, Sri Lanka, and parts of Southeast Asia own elephants.

At the Dasara festival, a dozen decorated elephants parade down the streets of Mysuru, India, with one of them carrying an idol of the Hindu deity Chamundeshwari.

Picture of a large elephant wrapped in a chain walking down an urban street and passing two young women, one of whom is riding a pink motorcycle

An elephant towers over two women on its way to a festival in Kerala, India. These gatherings can be traumatic and painful for elephants if they’re chained, mistreated, and forced to perform tricks. Walking on hot roads can also harm their sensitive feet. Both elephants and people die in conflicts sparked by close interaction. Preventing such deaths motivates researchers to learn as much as they can about Asian elephants and how to coexist with them.

Picture of a large elephant with long tusks kneeling before a white structure with its trunk curled up, surrounded by a crowd with hands held high or holding cell phones

Wasana, more than 50 years old, is the temple tusker—the most prominent male elephant—at the Kataragama complex in Sri Lanka, which houses Hindu and Buddhist temples and a mosque. The animal, which was captured from the wild and handed over to the temple at age five or six, has led the Kandy Esala Perahera, the Buddhist annual procession called the Festival of the Tooth, on several occasions.

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However, many of these captive animals are mistreated, spending much of their lives chained in small spaces and forced to perform tricks in stressful, loud situations. In many cases, mahouts—the term for captive-elephant handlers in East Asia—trap the animals in the wild at young ages and then “break” them over years, using several forms of abuse, such as bullhooks.

Picture of two elephants at night wearing elaborate costumes with lights being ridden by people

The Festival of the Tooth features about 100 elephants in ceremonial costumes. Hundreds of drummers, dancers, and singers join the parade, which began when the Buddha’s tooth was brought to Sri Lanka from India in the fourth century A.D.

Survival

Coexistence calls for understanding.

Mahout J.S. Raju leads a blind elephant, Ekadanta (Sanskrit for “single tusked”), to be bathed at Harangi Elephant Camp in Karnataka state, India. Retired from tourism, Ekadanta is likely over 60. Some researchers are turning to experienced mahouts as repositories of knowledge about elephant behavior and management.

What’s the future for the Asian elephant? Some experts believe that a mix of climatic and human-made factors will force the species into more isolated pockets. In the long run, this could lead to elephants becoming smaller, a phenomenon that has already occurred in Borneo, where elephants are 30 percent smaller than their relatives. Larger species of elephants that lived in Asia millions of years ago have already gone extinct.

Picture of five men attaching wires to a fence outside in a field

Bendiwewa villagers in Sri Lanka erect a section of solar-powered electric fencing. The 2.2-mile-long fence aims to protect 90 families’ gardens from routine elephant incursions.

Picture of hills with elephants walking through green bushes and a misty sky

Elephants wander a tea estate in Valparai, India, which was part of their forest habitat before being converted for production in the late 1800s. Today about 70,000 people live and work in the region among 120 elephants.

Picture of a blue house with a red light at the top and three people hurrying to get inside

A red beacon, installed by the nonprofit Nature Conservation Foundation in Valparai, India, flashes when elephants are known to be in the vicinity. The early-warning system developed in this region, which also alerts plantation workers to an elephant’s presence via text messages and voice calls, has reduced human deaths by elephants from an average of three a year to zero in the past two years.

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Picture of three women removing large blue brushes from a pick-up truck and tying them to the trunk of a tree

Researchers Pornpimol Kubsanit (at left), Sarah Jacobson, and Mananya Pla-ard install a novel object—a cow brush—at the edge of the Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary in Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand. The experiment, run by Hunter College in New York City, will test wild elephants’ responses to an unfamiliar object in their habitat. Understanding more about how elephants think and behave could lessen problems between the animals and people.

Picture of two elephants in front of a tree in a green forest with mountains and mist in the background. One elephant is touching its trunk to a metal box attached to a tree trunk.

Captive elephants interact with a steel puzzle box on a hill overlooking the junction of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar. Many wild elephants tested in a study can solve the puzzle by trying different ways to open the box’s doors, showing their ability to innovate, according to experiments by researchers at Hunter College.

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Yet for the time being, people’s reverence for elephants somewhat moderates the tension between the two species, says M.D. Madhusudan, an independent conservation researcher and visiting scientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India.

“Even where there’s a lack of physical space, there’s an enormous cultural space,” he says. That’s why, as long as elephants continue to be revered in Asia, there’s hope for their survival.

Picture of an elephant walking on a beach in the distance with a shallow body of water in the foreground

An older male elephant in Yala National Park in coastal Sri Lanka is known for taking nighttime walks on the beach. People who work with elephants often attribute distinctive personalities to them.

  • This story appears in the May 2023 issue of National Geographic magazine.

  • Srinath Perur is a writer and translator based in Bengaluru and Dharamshala, India. Brent Stirton covers wildlife, global health, and the environment.

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