THABYU VILLAGE, Rangoon Division — The village of Thabyu sits at the foot of the Pegu mountain range, more than 70 miles north of Rangoon, and though it is called a village, the settlement these days consists of just four huts and a monastery. Of the four huts, only one is occupied, giving Thabyu the feel of a ghost town.
At about 4 a.m. on Sept. 10, an uninvited guest came to Thabyu’s lone occupied residence. It was not a human, but a 10-foot-high wild elephant that is said to be the most ill-tempered pachyderm in the region.
The two people sleeping in the house, upon realizing that the giant animal was trying to break into their home, tried to frighten the beast away by shouting and setting off firecrackers. But the elephant was unfazed, and continued to linger around the hut. Only after the two started the engines of a pair of tractors parked in front of the hut did the elephant retreat into the surrounding bamboo forest.
“That elephant has stamped nearly 12 people to death,” Ko Pu, one of the hut’s inhabitants, recounted some days after the early morning elephant encounter. “It came to our hut to search for things like rice, fish paste and salt to eat. If an elephant visits your place, you either frighten it away or run away if you can’t scare it off. Otherwise, you will be stamped to death.”
It has been about 10 years now that more than a dozen villages in the west of the Pegu mountain range have faced a growing threat from wild elephants. The pachyderms migrate from one place to another from season to season in search of food. This often takes them to human dwellings, where they proceed to ravage huts and houses in the hunt for sustenance.
According to the tally of some locals, at least 50 people have been killed by elephants in the last decade.
Ten years ago, dense forest surrounded the village of Thabyu, where area residents engage in small-scale farming to make a living. But in the last decade, companies have leased much of the land from the government to grow crops. Ko Pu said even the very place where he and his wife live in Thabyu is now owned by the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings (UMEHL).
As a result, Thabyu is not the only ghost village in the area.
Even in the larger villages that remain populated, various “project plantations” have been cultivated under the ownership of private companies, and former military officers and government ministers. Forests were systematically cleared to make way for the plantations, but afforestation efforts were almost nonexistence and few trees have been planted to make up for the clearings.
This has resulted in a shortage of arboreal pastures for wild elephants, bringing them to the door fronts of people like Ko Pu. Thabyu used to be home to about 20 families, according to Ko Pu’s wife Nay Chi Nu, who added that she and her husband have not relocated like the rest because of a nearby sesame field that they rely on for an income.
“Elephants do not usually visit houses in the rainy season, but when they are short of food in the summer, they visit houses frequently,” Nay Chi Nu told The Irrawaddy.
The area has long hosted populations of wild elephants, and human inhabitants are a relatively new phenomenon. Many residents at the base of the Pegu range are victims of land-grabs elsewhere, and have settled here over the years.
“We work here because our lands in the villages were grabbed. To be frank, it seems like we are grabbing their [elephants’] pastures,” a local from the neighboring village of Thae War said.
Wild elephants are currently lingering around Thabyu due to its proximate sugarcane plantations, but most will move on to another place at the end of the harvest. Some suggest that there may be as many as 80 elephants living in the region at the moment.
Authorities have stuck notifications on trees stating that the place is a habitat of wild elephants—and that killing them is punishable by law—while urging villagers to inform them of any cases of rampaging elephants.
When authorities are informed, however, the cost to dispatch and host a team to handle the animal is often more than the financial losses incurred by a rampaging elephant. That makes local residents and land-leasing companies reluctant to seek authorities’ help, according to a staffer of a company that grows sugarcane on land owned by UMEHL, a state-owned conglomerate.
Because most companies won’t bear the cost of an elephant removal team, employees are instead expected to sacrifice sleep to scare away wild elephants, said Naing Win, who works on a sugarcane plantation.
Even the pastures of the Myaing Hay Wun timber elephant camp in Taikkyi Township, where acres of forested area still exists, are not enough for elephants there, according to a ranger from the camp.
“In the past, there were only 13 elephants at Myaing Hay Wun. But now, there are more than 20 and the pastures are insufficient. … We don’t even have enough pastures for elephants at our camp. Needless to say, wild elephants are short of food,” he said.
Standing in the all but deserted village, Ko Pu says the best defense is a collective one, and he hopes the region’s scattered inhabitants will again take up residence in Thabyu. As it is now, the scattered nature of their dwellings does not easily allow them to help each other if they come into conflict with an elephant.
“Therefore, I would like to have people live together in Thabyu village,” he said. “I have also told the people living in the fields to come and live with us when the rainy season is over since their fields are not too far from us. If there are many people, we can protect ourselves from the danger of elephants collaboratively.”
