Much like humans, elephants have different personalities, affecting the way they behave around people. Even in a landscape like the Nilgiri Hills (Tamil Nadu, India) with about 150 elephants, some are better known than others, but most are never seen. Coexistence Story has supported The Shola Trust to systematically identify elephants in order to understand their personalities, and use this inforrmation to allow people and elephants to coexist more peacefully.

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 To do this, they worked closely with the forest department field staff and local communities to photograph and identify as many of the elephants as possible - they each look different (with different ear shapes, trunks, tusks, scars etc). They then spent 3 years observing them (over 800+ hours), and found four distinct personalities emerge.

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First are transient elephants – seen only a few times a year, and rarely during the day. They move through the landscape but are not resident (you’ll only see them on camera traps and mostly late at night). 

 

Second are seen regularly through the year, so are resident, but avoid human habitation (only seen in valleys and hills away from people).

 

The third type is what we call “Brash youngsters” or the “fight or flight” elephants. They’re seen around human habitations a lot, but aren’t comfortable around humans and exhibit ‘fight-or-flight’ response or running away of charging at people. These are the ones causing most of the damage to people.

 

The fourth, and perhaps most interesting, are the highly habituated. These are often older males who spend most of the time around people but are totally unafraid and don’t respond to people trying to chase them away. They also rarely cause damage.

            
Most of the elephants (about 85%) are transient or shy and never interact with people, and another 8% are the highly habituated older males who don’t cause damage. Its only about 7% of the young males doing all the damage. So, from thinking all elephants and a problem and constantly chasing all elephants away from people, it became a lot easier to just manage these few individuals.

 

With this information, they were able to setup a web and mobile phone-based application – www.jumboradar.org to allow local communities and the field staff of the Forest Department to systematically identify and monitor all these individual elephants. The Shola Trust is now working with the state governments across Tamilnadu, Kerala and Karnataka to scale up this effort to allow the largest Asian elephant population in the world to live more harmoniously with people.