Human Elephant Conflict and the Role of Print Media

At present the number of wild Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) is between 35,000 and 50,000 (www.elephantcare.org), while the number in captivity is around 16,000 and declining. The trend in almost all Asian range states has been a drastic decline in wild elephant numbers, due to a range of anthropogenic factors related to increasing human population, loss and degradation of forest habitat, fragmentation of breeding populations and increasing humanelephant conflict (HEC). The Asian elephant is categorized as an ‘endangered’ species in the Red List of the World Conservation Union (IUCN 2008: www.iucnredlist.org) and is classified as a Schedule one species with the Convention for International Trade of Endangered Species. Many studies have been carried out on HEC both in Asia (Sukumar 2003; Jayawardene 2004) and Africa (Hoare 1999), but despite the lessons learnt and the wide range of measures and management strategies that have been employed to mitigate HEC (Nelson et al. 2003; Fernando et al. 2008), the intensity of the problem is clearly increasing.