'Daily shooting of wild elephants' in Sri Lanka? Govt. gives out guns

An AVAAZ petition addressed to Sri Lanka's President Anura Kumara Dissanayake by Champa Fernando, President of the Kandy Animal Advocacy Organization KACPAW, alleges “Daily shooting of wild elephants after a government member of Parliament called upon citizens to ‘shoot any animal that wanders into their lands,’ openly inviting them to act in contravention of the Fauna & Flora Protection Ordinance with impunity, issuing 13,207 firearms as of now to deal with crop damage, and publicising off-the-cuff that we have ‘4,000, too many wild elephants.’

- BY MERRITT CLIFTON

“Mr. President,” Fernando wrote in the preface to her petition, “the woefully understaffed and under-equipped Department of Wildlife Conservation is unable to treat the wounded elephants at the same frequency the wild elephants are being shot now.

“Unattended for months, limping around in pain”

“Bullet-ridden elephants, unattended for months, limping around in pain,” Fernando charged, “are what we and the tourists see as Sri Lanka’s wildlife wonders, with carcasses of fatally shot wild elephants increasingly being shown on media, tarnishing Sri Lanka’s image as a top animal-and nature-friendly tourist destination.”

The ongoing elephant/human conflict has been brewing for at least a decade, heating up in 2019, when some of the estimated 7,000 to 7,500 wild elephants in Sri Lanka killed about 150 humans.

Of the 361 elephants who reportedly died in Sri Lanka during 2019, 85% were reportedly killed by humans to protect their crops and homes.

Sri Lanka is a nation in which, according to the United Nations World Food Programme, 32% of households suffer food insecurity.

This is defined as “a lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy life.”

Protected on paper

Elephants in Sri Lanka are strictly protected, on paper. Poaching elephants for ivory can potentially bring a death sentence. But killing elephants in self-defense is permitted.

And Sri Lanka, an island nation only slightly larger than the single U.S. state of West Virginia, with more than ten times as many people, does have quite a lot of elephants by comparison to other elephant range states.

The African nation of Gabon, for example, has 10,000 elephants and 2.5 million people, but is more than four times the size of either Sri Lanka or West Virginia.