The elephant is very important to man not least as a symbol of strength, nobility, intelligence and beauty: the associations between us in culture, religion and industry are long established and legendary.

The ancestors of modern elephants first appear in the fossil record during the Eocene, about 45 to 55 million years ago. The first elephant, a pig-like creature living in Egypt -- Moeritherium -- was only about two feet tall and had no trunk. Gradually, possibly in response to the earth's cooling temperatures, the descendants of Moeritherium grew larger in size and developed the nose-upper lip combination that makes elephants so unique today. Biologists believe the trunk may have developed to allow the large animals with very short necks to reach food and water easily. More than 150 different species of elephants have been catalogued, including the hairy mammoths and mastodons.

There are two surviving elephant species, belonging to the order Proboscidea, the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). Currently, five subspecies of the African and four subspecies of the Asian elephant are recognised. These are distinguished by physical traits related to their geographic location. There does exist some taxonomic disagreement concerning the number of Asian subspecies due to the recent discovery of a population of "giant" elephants, about 0.3 m (1') taller than other Asian elephants from the forests of northern Nepal. As few as 100 of these elephants may survive. Traditional taxonomy has rested on physical traits, but modern technology has given insight into the genetic differences between populations which may be a more important measure of taxonomic status. The Vietnamese Asian elephant is one population which some consider deserves taxonomic revision.

Asian elephants once ranged from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in ancient Mesopotamia in the west, east through Asia south of the Himalayas to Indochina and the Malay Peninsula, including Sri Lanka and Sumatra and possibly Java, and north into China at least as far as the Yangtze River. Even in the 19th century it was still common over much of the Indian subcontinent and the eastern parts of its range. Today they are only found from India to Vietnam, with a tiny population in the extreme Southwest of China's Yunnan Province, with an estimated total of 35,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants remaining in the wild.

The Asian elephant is declining throughout its range and nearing extinction in the wild in many of the thirteen countries where it occurs. The ravages of modern warfare, industrial development, widespread logging and a rapidly expanding human population combined to radically change the Asian landscape in the last century. Particularly the population explosion after 1950, necessitating more housing, industrial and agricultural land to meet increased demand, contributed to reducing the traditional area available to Wildlife species. The decline in available habitat, serious enough in itself for the animals and population viability, has been acerbated by several factors, including poaching and official mismanagement.

Wild populations often number just a few hundred individuals, living in small, fragmented groups. In the densely populated countries of Asia, large numbers of people live within national parks or on their boundaries. Elephants need space too and many of them live outside protected areas. As their natural habitat dwindles to isolated fragments of forest and traditional migration routes are severed, they are forced onto agricultural land or into urban areas. People and elephants living side by side are increasingly coming into conflict.

Elephants in Vietnam have declined alarmingly due to habitat loss and fragmentation. The population has been reduced from 15,000 to 2,000 individuals in 1990 and now is down to less than 150 as of 1998, according to WWF. These animals are dispersed throughout the country in isolated populations, each containing fewer than 15 individuals. Without active management, they face extinction in the wild.

Elephants are the largest living land mammals.

Physically the Asian elephant differs from the African elephant, Loxodonta africana, in the following ways: smaller height; smaller ears; single finger instead of two on the top lip of the trunk; rounded as opposed to saddled back; double domed as opposed to single domed forehead; four as opposed to five hooves on the hindfoot and the females (and some males) do not carry tusks.

The trunk is used for feeding, drinking, squirting sand and water on the body and touching each other, which plays a major role in their social interactions. The "finger" on the trunk is very sensitive and makes it possible for these huge animals to pick up very small objects. The more than 40,000 muscles in the trunk make it very flexible and strong enough to lift whole trees.

Females average 2720 kg (5980 lb. ) and large bulls can weigh 5400 kg (11,900 lb.). Head and body length averages 550-640 cm, excluding the tail of 120-150 cm, while the average height at the shoulder is 250-300 cm. The circumference of the forefoot is approximately half the shoulder height of an elephant and may be correlated to age.

Elephants boast the largest teeth on the planet, exceeding even those of the toothed whales. The dental formula is (i 1/0, c 0/0, pm 3/3, m 3/3) X 2 = 26. For all practical purposes, elephants have just six teeth, not twenty-six. Moreover, only four of these really function as teeth.

A single massive molar is located in each of the four jaws (lower left, lower right, upper left, and upper right). These are complex, high-crowned grinding teeth. Each tooth is a series of enamel ridges (called lophs) covered with cement, resembling several teeth glued together. When elephants eat, they move their jaws forward and backward,

grinding food across the ridges. A fresh tooth is fairly smooth. As the cement is worn away, the ridges are uncovered.

As elephant molars are outgrown or worn out, they are replaced by larger and more complex teeth waiting in reserve. When most mammals lose teeth, they are replaced by teeth that push in from above or below. But elephant teeth are replaced from behind. Elephants are allotted just six sets of molars. The sixth set erupts when an elephant is about twenty-five years old. When the sixth pair is worn out, starvation is just around the corner.

The fifth and sixth teeth are incisors located in the upper jaws. Teeth in name only, they jut outward to form tusks, which aren’t used for chewing. But tusks are hardly useless. Both tools and weapons, they are used for fighting and digging and may also be used when eating.

Elephant tusks are tipped with enamel, which is soon worn away. The longest recorded Asian elephant tusk was 9 feet 10 inches.

Unlike other specialised herbivores who carry a chamber in their stomach filled with symbiotic bacteria who helps them to digest food elephants carry bacteria only at the end of their digestive cavity. Therefore, elephants are poor digesters and most of the faeces is voided with undigested matter.

Elephants gather information about their environment primarily through their senses of smell and hearing. Their sense of smell is one of the most acute in the animal kingdom and will react to the sent of a human from at least a kilometre. The eyesight of an elephant is good; however, they do not depend on this sense unless threatened. They communicate with each other using a wide range of vocalisations, including some very low frequency calls which can travel several kilometres. Elephant researchers have discovered that foot stomping and low-frequency rumbling also generate seismic waves in the ground that can travel nearly 20 miles along the surface of the Earth. Elephants may be able to sense these vibrations through their feet and interpret them as warning signals of a distant danger. In the late 1980s, it was discovered that elephants produce strong, low-frequency 20 hertz rumbles that can travel up to six miles through the air under ideal weather conditions. Later studies indicated that elephants use these low-frequency vocalisations to co-ordinate movements with other far-off herds. In 1997 it was confirmed that acoustic rumbles are accompanied by seismic vibrations in the Earth.

In spite of their large size elephants can move quite fast with a walking speed of 4-6 km/h, which potentially allows them to move through an extensive area of agriculture in one night. When running they can attain speeds up to 60 km/h.

Elephants are herbivores and their digestive system allows them to eat an extremely wide range of vegetable matter. In fact, there are very few plants they will not eat. However, the digestive system is inefficient and Elephants must consume huge amounts of food each day because half of it passes through virtually undigested.

An adult eats approximately 150 kg (wet weight) of food per day - As such they can spend up to 80% (20 hours per day) of their time feeding on vegetation including grasses, small amounts of leaves, woody parts of trees and shrubs - twigs, branches, bark and bamboo. Cultivated crops, such as bananas, paddy and sugar cane are also preferred, with the result that the elephant often becomes a pest in agricultural regions. It will also eat large quantities of flowers and fruits when these are available and will dig for roots.

Elephants tend to eat grasses in the wet season and switch to woody plants in the dry season. They use their trunks and tusks to remove bark and leaves from tree’s which can damage the trees directly or indirectly by allowing insects access under the bark. This removal of bark also make trees more susceptible to damage from fire.

It feeds during the morning, evening and night and rests during the middle of the day, requiring shade during the hot season to keep from overheating.

Elephants cannot go for long without water (a typical elephant can drink 20-50 litres of fresh water per day) and sometimes must travel long distances each day between water supplies and feeding areas. Like other animals, elephants need calcium, sodium and trace minerals. They are known to return repeatedly to sources of these minerals. In areas with little salt, elephants will walk for miles to feed on salt-rich soil.

Female Asian elephants attain sexual maturity when 9-12 years old. Males are capable of reproduction at 10-17 years, but they are still too young to dominate older females and do not significantly contribute to reproduction. Sexual maturity may be delayed for several years during drought or periods of high population density. The period of greatest female fecundity is between 25-45 years.

One calf is born every 3-4 years after a gestation period lasting about 22 months. The baby elephant weighs about 100 kg and is 0.95 m high at birth. There is a long period of juvenile dependency. The infant suckles for 3 - 4 years. Although mature male elephants may live alone, females live in family groups consisting of mothers, daughters and sisters, together with immature males. Young males appear to leave the family group and become solitary at about the time they become sexually mature.

Elephants are polygamous, usually with a higher ratio of adult females to adult male elephants. Females are polyoestrus with seasonality in breeding reported by some studies. The oestrus cycle is of 2-3 weeks duration, but the fertile period lasts for only 48 hours. Females usually give birth first at 15-16 years, with a calving interval of 2.5-8 years. These estimates depend greatly on the health and structure of the population. Menopause onsets around 40 years of age, but births have been recorded from elephants more than 60 years old. Male elephants leave the herd when sexually mature and only rejoin for mating. They usually reach maturity at 14-15 years, but may still not be sufficiently dominant to opportune a mate. Bull elephants are usually solitary, but may form temporary groupings.

Older bulls can enter a state called ‘musth’. Musth occurs in adult males between 15-20 years, one to three times a year and increases their likelihood of mating success. When they enter musth they stop feeding and move great distances in search of females. Fights between elephants are rare; however, when two musth bulls meet near a female in oestrus (i.e. sexually receptive), they can fight for hours. Bulls in musth can be very dangerous to people since they become fearless and aggressive.

Wild elephants can live to be sixty years old (80 years in captivity). The main cause of natural mortality in elephants is starvation. This occurs when the last of a series of teeth wares out and they are unable to chew woody material.

The Asian elephant is gregarious, and, although males sometimes live alone, females are always found in family groups consisting of mothers, daughters, sisters and immature males. In the 19th century, these family groups usually consisted of 30 - 50 animals, but much larger groups, as large as 100 individuals, were not uncommon. Sometimes an adult male can be associated with a herd. When not, adult males usually remain solitary and disperse over relatively small, widely overlapping home ranges; sometimes they gather together in small but temporary bull herds. They do not seem to be territorial, and there is a great amount of toleration between them, except possibly when the cows are in oestrus.

Elephants have a very complex social structure based on a matriarchal system. The matriarch is usually the oldest and biggest adult female. The female family unit or herd is the most stable elephant group, structured around a mother and her young. Lactating or pregnant females may form subgroups. Much care and attention is given to young calves that are constantly protected. Herds may split up during the day while foraging and during the dry season when food and water may be scarce and scattered. As a result group size for herds can vary considerably from three to over thirty individuals.

The other adult cows are usually the daughters or sisters of the matriarchal cow. Family groups move together and individuals are rarely separated by more than a few metres.

When a family group becomes too large it can split into two independent family units and move separately. These related ‘bond’ groups will move apart in the dry season and come together with a dramatic meeting ‘ceremony’ in the wet season when food is plentiful.

Cow groups have evolved as defensive units to protect calves and to defend against predators, including humans. The matriarchal family units serve an important function as a ‘storehouse’ of knowledge about food and water supplies throughout the seasons.

The Asian elephant currently occupies forested habitats in hilly or mountainous terrain, up to about 3600 m, and occurs in the Peninsular Malaysian Lowland & Montane Forests, Northern Indochina Subtropical Moist Forests, Sri Lankan Moist Forests, Kayah-Karan/Tenasserim Moist Forests, Western Ghats Moist Forests, Annamite Range Moist Forests, Eastern Indochina Dry & Monsoon Forests, and Eastern Indian Monsoon Forests.

Over 80% of the present wild population occur in forests, from the dry thorn forests of India to the tropical evergreen forests of Sumatra. Asian elephants are known to have occurred in primary forest above 1,750m, but prefer lowland forest. Areas such as selectively logged forest have been shown to have a greater habitat diversity and an increased carrying capacity for elephants.

An elephants’ ‘home range’ (the area it occupies in a given period, e.g., its life span or for one season) can be as little as 60 km² for cows and as large as 2000+ km² for bulls. The size of their range is dictated by resources such as food, water availability and human settlement. The availability and distribution of these factors changes seasonally and is reflected in seasonal changes in movement and habitat use. As a result elephants are more sensitive to manipulation of their environment than to direct manipulation of their numbers.

It is human interference on elephant environment and not 'elephant-vegetation dynamics' which has had the greatest influence on Asian elephant conservation. Throughout the range of the Asian elephant large tracts of habitat have been lost to human settlements and developments with the result that elephants have been compressed at higher densities into smaller areas of often degraded habitat. Some populations have not had the time to respond to these changes and have become extinct, while other populations have been forced into greater contact with the human populations surrounding them with a resulting increase in human-elephant conflict.

The minimum viable population density (MVPD) has been estimated at 0.31 individuals per km² (each animal requires 3.23 km² of space).

Crop raids by wildlife has happened ever since humans first began practising agriculture, with elephants being part of the problem both in Africa and Asia at least for centuries. There are Sanskrit records of this in India going back thousands of years.

Historically the relationship between wild animals and rural people has been antagonistic. Either people hunted animals for food or animals ate peoples’ crops and livestock, and occasionally the people themselves. Almost all wild animals are potential threats. Birds eat livestock and grains, reptiles are generally feared and most mammals will feed on either livestock or crops. In rural Asia today, wild animals are both a threat and a resource.

Wild animals labelled ‘problem animals’ are competing directly with humans for a resource. When an animal feeds on food, or drinks water claimed by people, it becomes a problem animal. The most common problem animals include the elephant, tiger, leopard, rhinoceros, wild pig, deer, monkeys in general, crocodile, rodents, most snakes and a few bird species. While the focus is on the elephant, it should be noted that this is just one species of many which threaten rural farmers. Research suggests that other pest animals may cause more loss of crops than elephants. However, elephants are considered a greater threat because of the danger they pose to human life and the difficulty farmers have defending their crops from them.

Conflict between elephants and people is increasing for a variety of reasons which are complex and difficult to resolve for technical, financial and sociological reasons. The problem can be very emotive as important resources are destroyed and human life lost. Elephants are generally perceived by people as property of the state. The state institutions responsible for protected areas are therefore considered responsible for control of their animals. These organisations are generally ill-equipped to do this and in turn are blamed for losses to crops and property.

Increased human demand for land has forced the elephants out of their forest homes by logging, agricultural clearance and ill planned development schemes. Elephant populations have become isolated and traditional migration routes severed by human encroachment. The Asian elephant is fast losing what little habitat it has left.

This has caused conflict because elephants raid the agricultural areas which occupy much of their former range.

Traditional methods for repelling elephants from field’s such as beating drums or pans, shining torches and throwing rocks’ are generally ineffective, and many people are killed by elephants in the process. The solution employed by park officials for habitual crop raiders is often the destruction of the offending animal. In many situations, the elephant responsible cannot be re-identified, and a token animal is killed to appease local people.

The destructive nature of elephant feeding can significantly change the ecology of a woodland. It is believed that in the past, elephants would feed in an area then move on to a new area, thus allowing the woodlands to regenerate. Because of growing human populations, the elephant’s range is now restricted and the trees that they eat are not allowed to recover.

Changes to woodlands affect the food availability for other species. While not ‘proven’, it is feared that the damage to plants caused by too many elephants in a protected area may cause the reduction of other valuable animals.

Shooting elephants is becoming increasingly unpopular for ethical reasons and alternatives to culling, such as translocation and contraception, are being considered.

For population reductions to be effective, large numbers of elephants need to be removed to maintain a balance between elephants and trees.

Elephants respond favourably to slash-and-burn agriculture, selective logging, and bamboo extraction, if these are done at a sustained-yield level, because early successional forest is maintained. Consequently, elephant management is compatible with long-term multiple use of forests.

The single most important cause of the decline of the Asian elephant has been the loss of habitat.

Population growth and resettlement programs have produced fatal clashes between humans and elephants. The species is being poisoned by plantation workers, shot by angry farmers, and killed for meat, hide and tusks. After the introduction of firearms to Sri Lanka around 1950, cultivators killed more than 300 elephants in seven years to protect their crops. Elephants are increasingly being killed accidentally in train and road collisions. In 1997, Sri Lanka lost 126 wild elephants to human-animal conflict.

Poaching is also taking its toll. Since ivory is only found in male Asian elephants this has led to bulls being hunted so extensively that sex ratios have been severely affected, particularly in southern India, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Up to 300 people died in India 1998 as hungry elephants raided crops. Human/elephant conflict in Tanh Linh district (Vietnam) has resulted in crop destruction and the deaths of more than 20 people.

The three general human/elephant interfaces are a hard edge, an isolated settlement and a mosaic. A hard edge is a clear line between elephants and people like a boundary fence of a park. An isolated settlement is a small population of people living in elephant range. The mosaic, which is currently the most common in communal areas is groups of villages interspersed or abutting areas where elephants live.

Quantum Conservation e.V. November 2000