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It was May 2022 in Bengkalis Regency, Riau Province and the elephants were getting on everyone's nerves.
For years, the forests had been cut down to make way for oil palm plantations and acacia and eucalyptus trees that fed the global pulp and paper industry—and left the elephants to forage in ever smaller areas, leading them to enter local villages in search of food and a good time.
On one occasion, a mother and baby elephant found a house in a village with an outdoor sink where the baby drank and splashed around before smashing up the place and leaving. On another occasion, a group of Sumatran elephants—one of four subspecies of Asian elephants known as Elephas maximus sumatranus—happened upon a crop of watermelons, which the babies used as footballs and the adults joyfully tossed into their mouths.
When the villagers put up electric fences to try and keep the elephants out, the creatures toppled trees onto the metal structures and stepped over them.
If the elephants were seriously vexed, they would rip up trees and chuck them at people.
“Was it that the elephants had strayed onto the villagers’ land or had the villagers strayed onto theirs?" Zulhusni Syukri, the director of the Rimba Satwa Foundation (RSF), a non-profit organisation based in Riau that monitors elephants, said of the ongoing dispute.
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In the early 2000s, when elephants started to emerge from their shrinking forests to look for food and came across a human, they would usually run away—but the animals were becoming increasingly fed up in Bengkalis, and one time in one village an elephant gored a man to death in an incident that people talked about for months afterwards.
When the elephants finally snapped and killed someone, the perpetrator was almost always a bull elephant—a large male with an impressive set of ivory tusks. Bull elephants liked to charge at their victims, knocking them to their feet before lifting them onto their tusks and throwing them into the air. When they landed, a mass of twisted and broken bones, the hapless villagers were skewered by a tusk to finish them off.
If an elephant entered a village, the villagers were supposed to call a mahot—an elephant wrangler who would arrive atop a tame elephant who would try to reason with the wild elephant.
The tame elephants were all animals with checkered backgrounds who had been sent to elephant school—a kind of community service programme developed by the Indonesian government designed to reform naughty elephants by giving them a sense of purpose.
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Elephants are the only surviving representatives of Proboscidea, a group of mammals including elephants and their relatives that first appeared in Africa around 55 million years ago.
There are thought to be some 50,000 Asian elephants across 13 countries left in the world, and Sumatran elephants have been listed as critically endangered since 2011.
According to Syukri, there are around 300 to 400 Sumatran elephants in Riau Province and around 1,400 to 1,600 in the whole of Sumatra, although the numbers are not exact because elephants are laborious to count and it is impossible to look everywhere.
When Syukri was asking after an elephant, he would always use the word "Datuk"—a traditional Malay term of reverence for a king or someone of noble blood. No self-respecting elephant conservationist would ever use the Bahasa Indonesia word “gajah” to talk about the animals directly, considering it impolite.
"Have you seen Datuk here today?" Syukri would ask a villager collecting wood in the forest. "Not today, but he was here yesterday," the farmer would answer.
Sometimes RSF would give the elephants names if they had characteristics that made them stand out from the rest of the herd. Pungki was a three-legged elephant, having lost a limb to a poacher’s snare some years ago, while Seruni was a sweet-natured bull elephant named after a flower. Jose, another bull elephant, had developed a reputation for chasing humans out of the forest if he happened across them—although Syukri promised that he had never gored anyone and probably wouldn't as long as he was left alone.
Unfortunately, elephants and humans leaving each other alone in Bengkalis was becoming increasingly difficult now that they had to share the same lands and, by May 2022, the elephants were displeased and the local villagers similarly exasperated by the deteriorating situation.
On 26 May, the conflict finally came to a head. A female elephant was found dead, collapsed in an area of jungle and already stiff as a board.
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At first, RSF tried to remain charitable, thinking that perhaps the elephant had died of natural causes, before a vet was brought in to try and piece together what had happened.
"Black," the vet said of the elephant's organs as an autopsy was conducted in the darkened forest by torchlight.
Blackened organs were a sure sign of cyanide poisoning—a drug easily available in Indonesia and often used as a pesticide. Inside the elephant's stomach were the remains of a pineapple, possibly injected with the poison.
Even worse, the autopsy revealed that the elephant had been pregnant.
When the RSF team found out about the baby elephant, they knelt next to the bodies and wept openly, adding to the shrieks and cries of the surrounding jungle.
Technically, under Indonesian law, elephants are a protected species, and harming one can result in five years imprisonment and a $6,500 fine—although actual prosecutions are few and far between, for myriad reasons from lack of resources to lack of evidence.
So it went in Bengkalis. In the end, no one was found guilty of poisoning the elephant and her baby. Potential elephant poisoners were a dime a dozen and plenty of now-taciturn farmers had a motive for the murder.
"We had our suspicions of course," Syukri said of the slaying. "But we could never prove it."
"For every death like that, there are dozens of people who were working so that it wouldn't happen. People who no one knows about, who have worked for years behind the scenes to take care of the elephants."
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Disclaimer: This post does not constitute legal advice. While every effort has been made to translate legal documents accurately from Indonesian to English, the contents of this newsletter is for information only based on Hukum’s understanding of the law.
Photo credit: Provided by RSF
