Analysis - As northern Cameroon heats up, elephants are migrating in search of food and water and increasingly finding themselves in face-to-face to humans.
As northern Cameroon heats up, elephants are migrating in search of food and water and increasingly finding themselves in face-to-face to humans.
Over time, however, the elephants' confusion turned to anger, and the onlookers' excitement to panic. The prolonged attention of the growing crowd caused stress and fear among the animals who"waved their ears, poured sand on the crowd, tore off tree branches and threw them", according to Mohamadou Bachirou, head of the local NGO Concerted Action for Sustainable Development . He says that these actions were meant to communicate:"go away, I'm not going to hurt you".
This changing climate has led to growing water scarcity, particularly during the dry season, and a shortage of vegetation. A single adult elephant can drink up to 200 litres of water and eat 150 kg of food each day. In response to the increasing frequency of such encounters, authorities in Waza National Park have dug 30 waterholes. This has provided a site for animals to drink from, but more than two thirds of the wells dry up in the extreme heat of the dry season. The park staff are now planning to equip at least one of the waterholes with solar-powered water pumps and are hopeful this will ensure constant water availability through the year.
"Elephants destroy up to 20 hectares of millets a day," says Bachirou."If farmers were to cultivate pepper, they could sell a single bag of it...and the proceeds could in turn be used to buy up to 10 bags of millet. This will limit conflict with elephants since they don't eat pepper and would hardly destroy it."
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