Indonesia: Rampaging Elephants won’t stop until illegal logging is stopped!
Wild elephant incursions into human settlements in Aceh will continue
if nothing is done to stop illegal logging in forest areas, Antara
news agency reported quoting a local nature conservation official as
saying. “The problem will persist unless illegal logging is stopped,”
Andi Basrul, head of the Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam Natural Resources
Conservation Agency (BKSDA), said here Saturday.
During December 2008,
wild elephants had invaded a number of villages in Aceh, damaged a few
houses and injured several people. Basrul said his agency could not do
much to stop the animals’ incursions because they were merely reacting
to the damage being done to their habitat. Villagers were known to
have tried to fight the elephants by poisoning them but Basrul said
the villagers’ actions would not be effective and only cause the
elephant population to shrink.
The root cause of the present conflict
between elephants and humans was the damage done to the enimals’
habitats by illegal logging, he said. The wild elephant problem
existed in the districts of Aceh Jaya, South Aceh and North Aceh, he
said. The only way to solve the problem, according to Basrul, was the
consistent implementation of the Aceh provincial government’s
moratorium on forest logging.
http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsworld.php?id=381411
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