International Hopebuilding News: Chillies keep elephants out, give southern African farmers new income
Some very inspiring news gets lost in archives – we’re resurrecting some Hopebuilding stories for Happyzine readers.
In southern Africa and increasingly around the world, chilli peppers are keeping marauding elephants alive and out of farmers’ fields while chilli sales raise farmers’ incomes and the sale of exotic chilli sauces helps supports the educational work. The win-win solution to Africa’s growing farmer-elephant conflicts is the brainchild of an American zoologist, Dr. Ferrel Loki Osborn, who has been working in Zimbabwe and Zambia since the early 1990s.
Herds have doubled to about 600,000 since ivory sales were banned in 1989, and elephants now appear in places they have not been seen for a century. At the same time, the growing human population has been moving further afield into forests to cultivate crops such as cotton, bananas and corn for cash crops and food. In the resulting clashes, elephants sometimes gore humans and angry farmers shoot elephants.
Dr. Osborn’s research showed that young bull elephants began their raids on farmers’ fields midway through the wet growing season more out of destructiveness than hunger. Traditional noise-making methods, costly electric fences, and even shooting some of the raiding elephants did not deter these young males.
Knowing that pepper extracts deter bears in the American West and that elephants’ sense of smell is 100 to 150 times better than humans, and having grown up in a family that made Tabasco sauce for a living, Osborn began to explore the possibilities of using peppers to repel elephants. He created the Elephant Pepper Development Trust in 1997 to carry out this work in the Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe, and then subsequently in Zambia. When aerosol spraying proved too expensive, the Trust’s researchers – funded by American conservation groups – developed a suite of “low-tech” approaches that farmers could use.
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