Chinese environmentalists are to create a 642-acre “elephant canteen” following a series of disastrous encounters between humans and the endangered animals which have resulted in several people being trampled to death.
Authorities hope the banana-stocked open-air restaurant near Yunnan province’s Pu’er City will help draw elephants away from human settlements that are suffering from growing conflict between man and beast.
Wild elephants once roamed large swathes of China but the advance of farmers who destroyed the forests in which the animals lived mean they are now only found in a small pocket of Yunnan near the country’s southwestern border with Myanmar and Laos.
Between 250 and 300 wild elephants inhabit the rainforests of Yunnan’s Xishuangbanna, according to state media, and increasing efforts are being made to protect them.
Experts say elephants rarely attack unless provoked but their proximity to human beings in this corner of Yunnan has reportedly caused a growing number of confrontations.
Last year there were 231 “incidents” involving elephants in one area around Pu’er City, Li Yichuan, a local forestry chief told state media this week.
At least two lives have been lost in the last 13 months, including a female villager whose body was found “covered with blood and bruises” after she had apparently been trampled by elephants.
Photographs published by Yunnan Web, a local news site, showed the woman’s corpse lying in a field beside mangled farm equipment.
In June this year, 14 wild elephants were blamed for the death of another village whose body found near a pine forest.
“Five villages in Yunnan have been invaded by herds of elephants since the Spring Festival holiday,” China Radio International reported last February.
Officials in Yunnan hope their walk-in “canteen” will prevent such incidents by providing elephants with a safe place to munch on bamboo and bananas far from villages where they might come into conflict with humans.
“This way, we can make sure elephants have enough to eat and they will interfere less in local people's lives,” Mr Li said, adding that compensation payments to victims of elephant attacks had risen by about one-third to £420,000 between 2011 and 2012.
The project’s coordinator, who gave his name only as Mr Tan, told The Telegraph that a 3,000 square ft banana plantation had been created for local elephants since June while an “artificial pond” was also being built for big-footed diners.
The “canteen” needed to be big since elephants could consume up to 660lb of food each day, Mr Tan added.
Four-thousand years ago elephants were “abundant” across China’s northeast, northwest and west, historian Mark Elvin writes in his seminal book on the Chinese environment, “The Retreat of the Elephants”.
But then came “a protracted war with human beings which the elephants lost,” Prof Elvin argues.
The war was fought on three fronts, according to Prof. Elvin: the destruction the elephants habitat, their “extermination” by farmers who were angry their crops had been trampled or eaten, and the pursuit of their ivory tusks and trunks, which were once considered a “gourmet’s delicacy”.
“The pattern of their withdrawal in time and in space was… the reverse image of the expansion and intensification of Chinese settlement,” Elvin writes, concluding: “Chinese farmers and elephants do not mix.”