Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 44
E N V I RO NM EN T
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GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
Encounters between
humans and animals do
not have to end in tragedy.
“It’s a beautiful idea,” said Gonçalves. “Because it’s not only stopping
elephants from getting into the crops and destroying everything, but it
gives [humans] also that sweet reward that is the honey.”
She said the park worked with community members who wanted to try
this kind of fencing. But while some are happy with it, others want a more
aggressive strategy.
Querida Flautoñe, a Vinho farmer, is one of the latter. She told me that
the day before our visit, an elephant came to the village and was eating
bananas in someone’s fields. She heard her neighbors making loud noises
and setting off firecrackers to chase the elephant away. Then they called the
rangers. Flautoñe said she has lost more than a few harvests of her maize,
sesame, bean, and sweet potato fields to elephants over the years, and
sometimes had to resort to sleeping in her fields at night, when it’s almost
time to harvest, to dissuade the elephants from devouring her livelihood.
The park states that “the most vulnerable within our buffer-zone communities—women, widows, the elderly—are selected as primary recipients
for measures such as elephant-proof silos for food storage.” However, Flautoñe said the silos don’t protect the crops before they are harvested. During
my visit, she told Jantar that she would prefer to have an electric fence, one
on the park side of the river, to better protect villagers. Jantar responded
that the animals need the river, too. And no one can split the river down
the middle. He insisted that the alternative fences work, though not 100
percent of the time. There are gaps in the fencing, and, of course, elephants
are notoriously smart and learn about those weaknesses.
The cleverness of escaping elephants could be a problem in areas
where there’s a push for more human settlement—more houses and more
fields—and both humans and elephants will need to give each other a wide
berth. Despite the so-called “peace-building” work of the human-wildlife
coexistence teams, it’s clear that there is still some work to do within the
park and the communities around it to support more positive interactions
between people and wildlife.
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