Gauging Farmers' Acceptance of 'Social Barrier' Mechanisms for Preventing Elephant Crop Raids.

The villages surrounding Bannerghatta National Park, Karnataka experience high human-elephant conflict in the form of crop loss. Forest Department maintained elephant barriers are not entirely effective in keeping elephants away from farmlands and cooperative participation in crop guarding is low. We assessed farmers' attitudes to suggestions of community implementation of chilli-tobacco barriers and beehive fences to prevent crop raiding. We found 64% of the farmers were willing to implement these methods. Despite the higher effort required, the chilli-tobacco barrier was preferred, due to lower costs. While commitment by farmers to defend their crops are crucial for problem control, the study did not show a very high acceptance of community-led barriers and the attitudes of the farmers towards the Forest Department and elephants were negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]