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  WWF 13 Mar 06
WWF opposes elephant capture on Sumatra

Sumatra, Indonesia: WWF is urging Indonesian forestry service officials in Sumatra's Riau Province to stop capturing and translocating elephants.

Recent captures in Riau have had a very high incidence of death as many of the endangered Sumatran elephants die during and immediately after the capture process. The survivors are likely to leave the forest they are released in and start raiding villages surrounding it.

"The death rate of elephants during official translocation operations is unacceptable and capturing should be the last resort. If the elephants are captured, we demand that an independent observer team be with the capture team at all times," said Nazir Foead, director of WWF-Indonesia's Species Conservation Programme.

"Unfortunately, the government is focussing on the symptom--capturing homeless elephants that come into conflict with people--rather than dealing with the underlying problem, which is the uncontrolled conversion of forests that are home to some of Sumatra's last wildlife populations."

In December 2005, eight elephants were secretly released by the Riau Forestry Agency in Tesso Nilo National Park. Within just four weeks, WWF's Elephant Flying Squad filmed them raiding the fields of nearby Lubuk Kembang Bunga village, the nearest village from the park. Currently, a herd of up to 51 elephants is stranded near Balai Raja village and has been raiding crops and damaging homes in the village.

The elephants are about 25km away from their home, the Libo forest. Libo is being illegally logged and converted at breakneck speed. WWF is calling on the local government to immediately stop those activities and organize an operation that will drive the elephants back to their forest.

"We have been working hard to stop the conflicts with elephants in our village, with the help of the flying squad," said Radaimon, the leader of Tesso Nilo Community Forum. "Putting elephants into our neighbouring forest cannot be accepted. These elephants will soon attack us. We are not able to clean up the mess of Balai Raja's problem."

In 2004, NGOs and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry developed a human-elephant conflict mitigation protocol for Riau that would avoid the kinds of cases that have occurred in recent weeks. If the protocol had been in place, it would have taught communities how to mitigate the conflict without suffering losses and without the need to capture elephants.

Since 2004, WWF has worked with the communities surrounding the Tesso Nilo forest, also on Sumatra, to avoid losses from raiding elephants. During that time, losses declined by 80 per cent, no houses have been destroyed and there have been no loss of human or elephant lives.

For Tesso Nilo National Park to accommodate any translocated elephants, the full, 100,000-hectare proposed area has to be declared a national park. Since 1992, the Riau Conservation Office has been calling for an elephant conservation area to be declared in Tesso Nilo but so far, only a small, 38,000-hectare area has been declared a park.

Riau has lost 57 per cent of its forests--from 6.4 million hectares to 2.7 million hectares--over the past 23 years, many of them through illegal conversion. Riau has lost half of its elephant population in the last seven years, with the remaining population numbering only about 350.

Protected areas for elephants like in Mahato and Balai Raja have been almost completely cleared illegally with no action by the local authority to stop it. WWF is calling on the government to immediately stop all forest conversions in Riau.
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