PHOTOS: Take a ride with the Elephant Response Team. And be careful!
NPRPHOTOS: Take a ride with the Elephant Response Team. toggle caption Tommy Trenchard for NPR "Every night, families are losing their fruit trees, their gardens, their fences," said Brighton Manongo, a farmer and community leader in Dambwa South, who once lost 1,000 heads of cabbage to elephants in a single incident. toggle caption Tommy Trenchard for NPR Burning chili bricks With the human population increasing across the region, Thouless believes we must adopt a "triaged approach" to addressing human-elephant conflict: accepting that in some areas, where the population density of people and elephants has reached a certain threshold, efforts toward mitigation may be unsustainable. toggle caption Tommy Trenchard for NPR "You need to be able to see what mood they're in and be able to tell a real charge from a mock charge," says Gift Ngandu. toggle caption Tommy Trenchard for NPR Shortly before dawn, the team conduct their last routine patrol of the night, rounding up the few elephants left in the town and ushering them back toward the national park, while the residents of Dambwa South emerge to assess the night's damage.
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