Wild animals ternty new settlers

Press, 12 September 1986, Page 28

Wild animals ternty new settlers

By

BILL TARRANT,

of Reuters, through NZPA Jakarta New settlers on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, sent there because of overcrowding in Java, are now fighting for space with wild elephants, tigers and boars. Recently, a herd of 40 elephants rampaged through a new settlement in Aceh on the northern tip of the island, trampling three houses and eating banana, coconut and vegetable crops. Earlier last month a man, aged 49, in the central province of Riau survived a hand-to-paw battle with a tiger but was badly bitten before another villager speared the cat with his lance. In the same month more than 100 sharpshooters from Jakarta went on a wild boar safari in the southwestern Bengkulu province to try to kill some of the thousands of wild pigs that have invaded new settlements. Sumatra, about the size of California, is the home of such rare animals as the hairy rhinoceros, black baboons, orangutans, goat antelopes, lemurs, pythons, parrots and the Sumatran leopard, which is smaller than a house cat. The number of people on the island has grown to 34 million from 21 million in the early 1970 s as the Government has sent more settlers there from the overcrowded island of

Java. Indonesia’s population of 165 million is the fifthlargest in the world and 100 million of its people live on Java, only a third the size of Sumatra. Environmentalists say Sumatra’s wild animals, particularly elephants, resent settlers encroaching on their traditional habitats and have begun eating farmers’ crops because their own feeding grounds have been disturbed. "There have- always been elephant problems on Sumatra,” a World Wildlife representative, Raleigh Blouch told Reuters. “But now it is getting worse, because there is a lot less primary forest, and there are more problems with more people coming in,” he said. Over the last four years, the Indonesian Army has tried several times to shift some of the island’s 2000 to 3000 elephants to new homes in jungle preserves, but they will not stay where they are put. The elephants that recently invaded the Acehnese village were part of a herd of 70 that the Army had moved to a new home 60km away in May, 1985. The 1985 operation was launched after the elephants, led by an albino one-tusked bull, killed a girl, aged 17, and forced about 1000 villagers to flee their homes and seek refuge in nearby mosques and schools. Indonesia’s biggest ele-

phant drive took place in 1982 when 230 wild elephants were driven 50km in “Operation Ganesha,” named after the elephant god in Hindu mythology.

However, some of those elephants have wandered back to their old stomping grounds in south Sumatra, now a transmigration settlement, to indulge their new taste for rice, coconuts and bananas. The failure of some elephant drives has prompted the Government to set up reform schools for the delinquent animals in Aceh in the north and Lampung in the south. Twenty Thai and Burmese “mahouts,” or elephant tamers, have been brought in with eight trained elephants to teach their Sumatran cousins how to haul logs and carry tourists. Sending the delinquent beasts to school is one thing, capturing them is quite another, Mr Blouch said. The most common method is to infiltrate the herd with trained elephants who then help drive the wild ones into a stockade where trainers try to “civilise” them. The trainers “keep them awake all night, bother them with fires, do not let them sleep, do not give them food, and then after a while their spirit is broken,” Mr Blouch said. The director-general for forest protection, Mr Rubini Atmawidjaja, said man and beast could live together if they could learn together. “The buffalo and the

orangutan live peacefully with people. They were wild once. Then look at the logging camps in India and Burma where elephants do useful jobs,” he said.

Tiger trainers are also being used to tame some of the 300 Sumatran tigers. Although there are far fewer of the wild cats, they can be more dangerous than the elephants, conservation officials say. Tigers have eaten at least five people on Sumatra over the last year, the Antara News Agency has reported. The victims were attacked mostly while working in fields. In 1984, six people were killed in central Sumatra alone, almost all of them new settlers from Java, Antara reported.

Even pythons, which can help farmers by eating pests such as rats and small boars, are slithering out of the bush and turning up on farms.

Last year a little boy was rescued from a giant snake that had coiled itself round his body to crush him to death, Antara reported.

Wild boars in the southern part of the island are eating settlers’ crops almost as soon as they are planted, say Nature Protection Agency officials.

It had hoped that sharpshooters on last month’s boar safari would kill about 100,000 boars, but they bagged only about 300.