Edition 45: Winter 2008/9

A text message from Kimani flashed across Richard Lesowapir’s screen: “I’m heading for neighbouring farms.” Not too impressive until you realise that Kimani is a huge bull elephant.

Usually residing within Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kimani has a long history of raiding villagers’ crops during the harvest, sometimes wiping out six months of income at a time.

Kenya is the first nation where elephant texting is used as a way to protect both a growing human population and the wild animals that now have less room to roam. Two years ago, after the Kenya Wildlife Service had been forced reluctantly into shooting five elephants from the conservancy who refused to stop raiding crops, Save the Elephants stepped in to see if they could break the habit and save Kimani, the last of the regular raiders.

They placed a mobile phone SIM card in Kimani’s collar, then set up a virtual ‘geofence’ using a global positioning system that mirrored the conservatory’s boundaries. So whenever Kimani approached the virtual fence, his collar texts rangers. Since then, they have intercepted Kimani 15 times. Once almost a nightly raider, his last excursion towards a farmer’s field was months ago.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, said the project is still in its infancy – so far only two geofences have been set up in Kenya – and it has its problems. Collar batteries wear out every few years and it’s expensive work: Ol Pejeta has five full-time staff and a standby vehicle to respond when a message flashes across a ranger’s screen.

It’s a huge relief to the small farmers who rely on their crops for food and to pay their children’s school fees. “We can live together,” said one farmer. “Elephants have the right to live, and we have the right to live too.”