The Elephants Who Text Rangers To Warn They Are Heading For Village Crops!!!!!!!

by **J The Kidd** Mon Oct 13, 2008 8:02 pm

Elephants in Kenya are sending text messages to warn wildlife
rangers that they are heading for the crops of neighbouring villages.

The elephants have a mobile phone SIM card inserted into their
collars that automatically sends a text message if they stray too near
farms.

The rangers then use spotlights to frighten the elephants back inside the 90,000-acre Ol Pejeta conservancy.

The Save the Elephants group is using the system after the Kenya
Wildlife Service reluctantly shot five elephants from the conservancy
who refused to stop crop-raiding.

They first used the technique on a huge bull elephant called Kimani,
who was the last of the regular raiders. They set up a virtual
'geofence' using a global positioning system that mirrored the
conservatory's boundaries. When Kimani crossed this line the chip in
his collar alerted rangers who used torches to warn him back.

Kimani has been intercepted 15 times since the project began. Once
almost a nightly raider, he hasn't been near a farmer's field for four
months.

It's a huge relief to the small farmers who rely on their crops for food and money for school fees.

The Elephants Who Text Rangers To Warn They Are Heading For Village Crops!!!!!!! FUCKYOUPAYMEMOSTUNDERRATEDOVERWORKEDUNDERPAID

Basila Mwasu, a 31-year-old mother of two, lives a stone's throw
from the conservancy fence. She and her neighbors used to drum through
the night on pots and pans in front of flaming bonfires to try to
frighten the elephants away.

'We had to go into town to tell the game (wardens) to chase the elephants away or we're going to kill them all,' Mwasu said.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, said the
project is still in its infancy - so far only two geofences have been
set up in Kenya - and it has its problems.

Collar batteries wear out every few years. Sometimes communities think
placing a collar on an elephant implies ownership and responsibility
for the havoc it causes.

And it's expensive work - Ol Pejeta has five full-time staff and a
standby vehicle to respond when a message flashes across a ranger's
screen.

But the experiment with Kimani has been a success, and last month
another geofence was set up in another part of the country for an
elephant known as Mountain Bull.

Moses Litoroh, the coordinator of Kenya Wildlife Service's elephant
program, hopes the project might help resolve some of the 1,300
complaints the service receives every year over crop raiding.

The biggest bonus so far has been the drop in crop raiding.
Douglas-Hamilton says elephants, like teenagers, learn from each other,
so tracking and controlling one habitual crop raider can make a whole
group change its habits.

Elephants are ranked as 'near threatened' in the Red List, an index of
vulnerable species published by the International Union for
Conservation of Nature.