FEATURE - Shy Ivory Coast elephants wreak rare havoc
Date: 01-Jan-02
Country: COTE D'IVOIRE
Author: Alistair Thomson
"They have destroyed everything - what can we do?" asked a woman cradling a young child outside her mud house.
It is rare for people to complain about elephant sightings in Ivory Coast. Despite its name - or rather because of it - most visitors to the West African country leave without so much as a glimpse of the reclusive creatures.
The herds still remaining after centuries of hunting tend to stay deep inside half a dozen parks and protected forests, such as Mont Peko in the west of the country. Experts are not even sure how many elephants are left.
Hugo Rainey, a British zoologist, was studying hornbills in Mont Peko when the elephants sallied forth last month, destroying the cocoa crops.
"Every night there was drumming and whooping to keep the elephants away," he said. "But in spite of the drumming, we found the elephants had been raiding crops about 300 metres (yards) from our camp."
"I haven't seen that before in Ivory Coast - normally the elephants here are so shy you never hear about them," he said.
FEW SIGHTINGS
Such reticence is not surprising. During the 1980s, when poachers killed an average of 200 African elephants a day for their tusks, the population plummeted to an estimated 625,000, down from 1.3 million in 1979. A 1989 international ban on ivory trading is credited with saving the species.
Herds in southern and eastern Africa have since recovered, but populations in West Africa appear to have lagged behind.
Estimates for Ivory Coast's herds range from a few hundred to the low thousands. In a 1998 report, the African Elephant Database listed 51 definite sightings and said dung counts and other clues suggested there could be up to 500 in the country.
"We don't know how many elephants there are," said Tano Sombo, head of Ivory Coast's nature protection service.
"We don't know if they are venturing out of traditional havens in the national parks more now because there are more of them, or because their habitat in the parks is being destroyed."
Ivory Coast's lush primary forests have been slashed by uncontrolled logging and a recent study estimated that only two-fifths of the country's forests remain.
After trees have been felled, the land is often used for cocoa plantations or subsistence farming, leaving the elephants with an ever-decreasing territory.
JUNGLE SPELL
In Mont Peko, farmers asked the local authorities to help scare off the elephants, but they said little happened beyond a couple of officers coming to shoot guns in the air.
"In Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe crop raiding by elephants is more of a problem, so there are projects to curb it without harming the elephants," Rainey said. "Here there are none."
On paths forged by elephants through the dense undergrowth of Mont Peko's virgin forest, occasional piles of fibrous dung sprouting rice and cocoa seedlings bear witness to stolen crops.
Elephants feast on rice and the yellow and red cocoa pods whose beans make Ivory Coast the world's top cocoa producer. And they love the leaves and nutritious tuber of cassava, which they unearth by gripping the stem with their trunks, kicking away at the base and destroying everything around it.
Frustrated farmers are reluctant to take action against the invaders themselves, and not only because of the legal ban on hunting. Most locals believe elephants are protected by a spell, and say anyone who tries to harm them will be cursed.
SMALL, SHY, TATTERED AND TASTY
Ivory Coast's elephants are mainly forest dwellers, shy and smaller than their savannah cousins. Their ears are often tattered, torn as the animals move through dense forest.
Also noticeable are their smaller tusks - an evolutionary answer to the once-widespread ivory trade.
In the 16th century, the English geographer Richard Hakluyt wrote of explorers returning from West Africa with hundreds of tusks, some as wide as a man's thigh.
"In most of West Africa, like any heavily hunted area, l
