my 2013 superhots

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Hot Chilies Keep Elephants At Bay

LINK

With a PhD in zoology from Cambridge University, Loki Osborn went to Africa intent on saving elephants. But after he got there in the mid-1990s, he realized the problem isn't too few elephants, but too many. Elephant conservation efforts in southern Africa, centered on setting aside parks and curtailing poaching, have been a great success, raising the population from 283,000 10 years ago to 400,000 today. But as a result, today elephants are killing people, as well as the other way around. The Kenya Wildlife service says elephants kill more people in its parks than all other predators combined. Zoologists estimate that elephants kill 500 people a year worldwide; great white sharks, by comparison, kill four. Part of the problem is an expanding human population. But with an African elephant population growing at a rate of 4.5% a year, the animals are moving into areas where they haven't been seen in 100 years, if ever. From his base next to Victoria Falls in Livingstone, Zambia, a country where their numbers have risen from 7,000 to 30,000 in the last decade and where up to 10 people are being gored or trampled each year, Osborn found elephants were making new enemies. "The view of most people I met was that if they could have elephants shot, they would," he says. So what is a professionally-trained friend of elephants to do?