Elephants are quite intelligent social animals, full of curiosity and will constantly try new things. The leader of the elephant herd is the eldest female. Under the leadership of the elder, the elephant herd will continue to migrate, foraging for food, giving birth to cubs, and raising young during the migration process. While male elephants act alone, they often communicate with elephants using inaudible infrasound waves, and their feet can also transmit infrasound waves, which can reach as far as ten kilometers.


The education of elephants is very complicated. Female elephants in the group will not give birth to baby elephants until about 20 months of pregnancy, and under the protection of the group, the baby elephants will not become sexually mature until about 20 years old. During this process, the elders in the elephant herd will continue to educate the young elephants. And they also have super-strong memory for 20 to 30 years. They will use their footsteps to measure the rainforest river valleys, meadows and dense forests they have walked through, and draw their own "elephant map" in their hearts. Maps where food is plentiful, where you can enjoy a mud bath, where you can take a dip in the water, and where humans live. Human habitation means high energy density and easy access to crops.


In the past, most Asian elephants foraged in mountains and forests. In the wild, their diets are quite extensive. At present, it is known that there are about 106 kinds of plants in the wild. Adult elephants eat about 150 to 200 kilograms of food per day. In the past, it was possible to eat for 20 hours a day in the mountains. In order to meet the required food intake, the area of each wild elephant's survival activities could reach tens of square kilometers. Since they discovered some "gifts of nature", they have never seen such neat rows of sugar canes and plantains. It is simply a gift from God. This is the human farmland in their eyes. So, after feasting on them, they didn't leave all at once. In the gradual observation, the elephant group recorded these "chosen places". And they have mastered the cycle of crops ripening, so they can pay regular visits.


Human crops are rich in nutrients. In the past, elephants spent 20 hours a day looking for food in the rainforest. Now the herds of elephants go to the farmland to eat for three or four hours a day. And they especially like the crops such as plantains, sugar cane, rice, corn and other crops grown by farmers. The elephants were happy, but they caused serious losses to the farmers. Thus, the human-elephant conflict began in its most primitive form.


Asian elephants are cute and intelligent animals, but at the same time they are also very dangerous. Especially when people get too close to them in the wild. When you get close to the elephant herd to a certain extent, the elephants feel threatened and will almost certainly attack people. Elephants run faster than humans and are bigger than cars. Facing a single elephant in the wild, humans may be able to escape, but facing the charge of groups, humans have almost no way to survive.


Southeast Asian countries have made great efforts to ease human-elephant relations. For example, forest rangers are used to monitor the location of elephants for a long time, and monitoring personnel use drones to conduct long-distance monitoring to reduce their own safety risks. Then, in areas where elephants are haunted, advance warnings are given to avoid the "unexpected encounter" between people and elephants as much as possible.



For the problem of elephants going down the mountain to eat crops, insurance is used to subsidize farmers' losses. Although the amount of the subsidy was not enough to cover their losses, they were more able to tolerate the destruction of their farmland by elephants.



After all, elephants don't know what they are doing, they are just adapting to the world in their own way.



Finally, some woodlands around the reserve were converted into wild banana forests or food source bases for Asian elephants such as corn, morning grain, and sugarcane fields. The food base complements the food source for wild elephants, keeping them in the perimeter of the protected area while keeping them as far away from human habitation as possible. Some people ask why do we need to protect elephants? Because they belong here just like humans.