COLOMBO: Sri Lanka has recorded the highest annual elephant deaths and second-highest human deaths in the world due to the human-elephant conflict, according to a report in the Daily News.
At a meeting of the parliamentary Committee on Public Accounts (COPA) recently, it was revealed that Sri Lanka has been ranked second in reporting the highest number of human deaths due to the human-elephant conflict in the world, while India holds the first rank.
COPA Chairman Tissa Vitharana said that even though the average number of elephant deaths due to the human-elephant conflict in Sri Lanka is 272 per year, 407 elephants had died during the past year.
He also said that although the average number of human deaths due to the human-elephant conflict is 85 per year, 122 people had died during the past year.
Vitharana and other members of COPA emphasized the need for the Wildlife Department and other relevant agencies to work together on a more efficient program to resolve the matter.
He said that despite 60 years of efforts to resolve the human-elephant conflict, no significant progress had been made and that a new approach was needed to find a solution.
The committee pointed out that although 4,211 km of elephant fences had been constructed by 2016 to control the human-elephant conflict across the island country, they had become inactive in a short period of time due to improper maintenance.
The committee also said many constructions had to be halted due to protests by the people in some areas who thought that the construction of the fence was a boundary of their land.
Killing wild elephants in Sri Lanka is a criminal offence but there have been regular reports of angry villagers poisoning or shooting them.
Official records show the population of wild elephants in Sri Lanka is estimated at 7,500.
Meanwhile American pop singer Cher took to Twitter over the weekend to react to the report that Sri Lanka was leading the world in elephant killings. The celebrity musician turned animal rights activist posted a series of impassioned tweets responding to various parties about the news while also highlighting other alleged elephant abuses.
Cher recently grabbed the headlines when she played a pivotal role in securing the release of Kaavan, dubbed the world’s loneliest elephant, from a zoo in Pakistan. Kaavan was a diplomatic gift Sri Lanka made to Pakistan in 1985. He spent the last 35 years in a barren, substandard zoo enclosure in Islamabad. Since his mate Saheli died in 2012, Kaavan had been living there in isolation, until he was moved to a wildlife sanctuary in Cambodia where he will roam freely with a herd of local elephants.
Cher launched a sustained high profile campaign to highlight the elephant’s plight and paid for a legal team to secure Kaavan’s release from the Islamabad zoo.
