i have a zoo

Chapter 143 Man and Elephant

Zhao Jia turned his head away and subconsciously looked at a display board next to him.

The ivory display just now talked about the greedy people's desire for beautiful ivory, which led to the cruel elephant poaching, and this display is about the more complicated human-elephant conflict.

First, some stories about human-elephant conflicts were told.

In 15, the XSBN family was playing mahjong, with the baby next to them, when suddenly an elephant rushed towards their house, knocking down the house, and all four were injured.Fortunately, someone saw the elephant coming and took the baby away, otherwise I don't know what happened.

Professor Zhang, an authority on elephant research, took his students to do a project in the XSBN Wild Elephant Valley. There was a lady boss who was in charge of cooking for the students. On a rainy day, the lady boss went out and encountered a wild elephant and was trampled to death by the elephant.

In the 1988 years from 2016 to 28, 68 people were trampled to death by elephants in XSBN, Pu'er and other places, 320 people were injured by elephants, and agricultural losses exceeded 300 billion yuan.

For the villagers, elephants are undoubtedly a hidden danger in life. They are afraid of encountering elephants when they go out, and they are afraid that the crops they have planted so hard will be ruined by elephants.This doggerel was written by Professor Zhang on the chaimen of a fellow villager's house when he was researching in Pu'er.

The tragedy is not only for humans, 80 elephants were also killed during this period.

In 16, two young elephants passed by the village and died by mistakenly eating the crops treated with pesticides. The elephant herd lingered for several days in front of the dead bodies of the two young elephants, and their mournful cries resounded through the valley.

The gestation period of elephants is as long as 22 months, and each litter can only give birth to one head, which can only be regenerated after five or six years. Elephant herds attach great importance to baby elephants.

The death of the young elephant made the elephant herd extremely irritable and full of hostility towards humans for a period of time, causing a lot of panic in the local area.

In another family, the daughter-in-law came out to go to the bathroom and encountered an elephant entering the yard.Seeing that he was about to rush over, the man hurried out and shot the elephant with a shotgun.The shot just hit the vulnerable place behind the female elephant's ear and killed it immediately.

The mother elephant was still pregnant, and the elephants were very angry. They began to wander around the house the next day, fearing that the elephants would retaliate, so the villagers had to report to the police. They were arrested for illegal possession of guns, and the whole family moved away.

But even after five or six years, the elephant herd would often go to the house to inquire about information, as if they were still waiting for the male master to come back and then take revenge.

Looking at the display board, Zhao Jia was extremely shocked.

He had never heard of so many people being trampled to death by elephants.

I thought tigers, bears and other carnivorous beasts might be more dangerous, but it seems that the accidents happened in circuses and zoos. Now I have never heard of anyone being killed by tigers in the wild. Instead, it was elephants. The docile giant actually has such a cruel side.

If you put yourself in his shoes, even a wall near his house would not be able to stop him. A huge monster that can crush a person with one foot dangles around. He often comes to the fields to see if there is anything to eat, and he probably has to worry about sleeping at night.

Why is the conflict between elephants and humans so intense, it can even be described as tragic?Is it because there are too many elephants and there is not enough food, so they eat the crops grown by humans?Is there any solution?
With this question in mind, keep reading!
In 99, Professor Zhang, an authority on elephant research in China, just started to conduct domestic elephant surveys, studying their numbers, distribution and habits.

Elephants are hard to count!
They have no concept of national borders. They may eat in the country in the morning and go to Laos in the afternoon.Researchers can't cross borders casually, so they can only go to the villages to inquire about the situation in a stupid way, and collect statistics one by one.

Ask if there are 5 elephants in this village, then go to a village one or two kilometers away and ask if there are 10 elephants.Later, according to the outline of the elephant's ears, the shape of the ivory, and the identification of each individual, each elephant was given a name to distinguish the family of different elephants.

I have traveled all over the places where elephants have been distributed in history. In this way, after 20 years of hard work, I have gradually counted the number of elephant herds.

It was discovered that there are less than 250 wild Asian elephants in China!
In domestic zoos, there are 300 Asian elephants in captivity.

Zhao Jia's eyes widened: "Shocked!"

The number of African elephants is counted in hundreds of thousands. I originally thought that there must be thousands of elephants in China, not to mention tens of thousands?
I really can't figure it out. With only 200 elephants, Yunnan is also the place with the best environment and the densest forests in China. What's not enough for such a large forest?Why are there so many conflicts with people?
In recent years, the annual number of casualties and economic losses caused by elephants has increased.

The reason for the conflict is that the habitat is compressed.

Although it looks lush and lush from the sky, and even the forest coverage is increasing, many of them are actually rubber forests.

橡胶作为一种重要的工业原料，从60年代开始引进国内，从零开始种植，参照《XSBNDZ治州国民经济和社会发展统计公报》和《云南统计年鉴》，1990年、2000年、2000 年、2010 年、2014 年XSBN橡胶林官方统计面积分别为 8.50、13.20、27.13、33.72 万公顷，而14年的遥感监测面积比统计还要大一些，达37.66公顷。

The area of ​​XSBN is only 191 hectares, and a quarter of the area is planted with rubber forests.

Although the rubber forest is also a tree, elephants don’t like to eat it, and neither do other animals. The same tropical rainforest may have hundreds of plants in it. Rubber forest is just one plant, so it is also called a green desert.Just looking green, there is no species diversity.

The area is gradually increasing not only rubber forests, but also economic crops such as tea and bananas, as well as cultivated fields.

PE City was originally called Simao, but later changed its name to Pu'er because of the popularity of Pu'er tea produced in Pu'er.

After 2000, the price of rubber soared, and the common people basically planted rubber where they could.

Plant rubber trees, and even break through the areas suitable for rubber growth.The suitable altitude for rubber growth is below 900 meters, and it was planted at an altitude of 1500 meters at that time.

Rubber has grown for ten years and is still a small tree. The rubber cannot be harvested, and a large area of ​​tropical and subtropical vegetation has been destroyed.

And the altitude below 900 meters, which is suitable for rubber growth, is also an area where Asian elephants like to move.

Now XSBN is the most suitable habitat for Asian elephants, with an area of ​​less than 5%.

It was not until 15 that the common people stopped planting rubber because of the excessive planting and the rapid drop in the price of raw materials.

(End of this chapter)