Very recently I met with a fantastic elephant scientist and a research specialist in human-elephant conflict mitigation. As he said average death rate of human is 50 and elephant is 200 due to this human-elephant conflict in SL; he has been managing the research for 30 years, and he realized relocation of herd of elephants would never solve the problem; the Wildlife Conservation has relocated more than 200 elephants from human areas to national parks, but the statistics explains it only increases the conflict; how this happened? normally moving elephant babies and females would never solve the problem, matured males are the aggressive ones; as he said he and his team have practiced relocating aggressive ones for last 10 years, they put GPS collars to those elephants and mapped their behavior and moving patterns, unbelievable , ultimately those aggressive ones returned back to their native places even after 1-2 years. While they are coming back they destroyed many other villages, crops and civilians. So the conflict has been almost increased..!! after 50 years of practiced he has mentioned this to the government and wild life, but they have never taken an action plan or proper solution for this. Only thing government should do is to find some investments and funds, he is always ready with all the solutions for this problem, even to give his advice, manage the project voluntarily, but question is why the hell government don't take Human-Elephant conflict as a serious issue? loss of 50 people, 200 elephants and millions of property per year; isn't it a critical economic and social issue?? Last time world bank has given money to fund the project, but Namal Baby has renamed the project and asked money for some other development. So World Bank has rejected the whole project.What a shame..!!! I would say building "World's Biggest Salt Water Pool" , and "World's Biggest Cricket Ground" , "World's Tallest Tower" in SL is not the priority Mr President, there are lot of other important things, you must think and do.
