78 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020
a white elephant approached her holding a lotus
fl ower in its trunk and then disappeared into her
womb. Royal counselors told the queen that the
elephant was an auspicious sign, that she was go-
ing to give birth to a great king or spiritual leader.
Chan smiled. “I think there’s another story about
Buddha, that in one of his previous lives he was
an elephant.”
Legends like these are one reason some Asian
cultures tend to have a soft spot for elephants,
in spite of all the trouble they can cause. Hindus
worship the elephant-headed god Ganesh, a son
of Lord Shiva, who is known as the remover of ob-
stacles. Some Asian countries prohibit the killing
of elephants. In Thailand, for instance, the penal-
ty is up to seven years in jail and/or a fi ne of up to
$3,200. Such prohibitions date back as far as 300
B.C., when a Hindu text, the Arthashastra, laid out
the rules for building elephant sanctuaries and de-
creed that killing an elephant there would be pun-
ishable by death.
Venkatesh, who grew up in the Boston area but
was born in India, notes that the traditional rev-
erence for elephants may not deter angry farm-
ers. “When you’re spending three or four nights
a week chasing elephants out of your fi elds, you
might not be thinking about Ganesh at that time.”
In general, poachers, who are primarily inter-
ested in ivory, don’t hunt Asian elephants with the
same avarice they show African elephants. Female
Asian elephants usually don’t have tusks at all, and
only some Asian males have prominent ones. But
wanton killing does occur. In 2018, the Smithsonian
researchers and their partners reported that seven
of the elephants they’d fi tted with GPS collars in Myanmar had
been poached for their meat or skin. “We found entire groups of
elephants that had been slaughtered, including calves and cows,
and skinned,” said Leimgruber, the Smithsonian conservation
biologist. “That’s not a response to an attack.”
Some governments try to prevent retaliatory killings by of-
fering compensation to aff ected farmers, but that approach
is a work in progress. The journal Frontiers in Ecology and
Evolution reported last year that such programs “often face
severe criticism due to insuffi cient compensation, logistical
challenges, ineff ective governance, a lack of transparency, re-
duced local understanding of program scope and limitations,
and fraudulent claims.”
Chan says some farmers have asked, “Can’t you just take“It’s still a very
emerging fi eld—
addressing
conservation
problems from
a behavioral
perspective.