Ronaldo, the Holy Killer

Published in GEO magazine 12/22 (German)

Time and time again, disaster erupts from the darkness of the jungle in the form of a murderous elephant. It invades villages and kills villagers. An animal that must be shot? Surprisingly, the people in Nepal see things quite differently.

Balaram Chaudhary stops and points to deep tracks in the mud. They look as if someone had pressed round wastepaper baskets into the soft ground. "These are Ronaldo's footprints," says the jungle guide. "We must be very careful now." Mist lies like a white sheet over the jungle, the shadows of the sal trees reaching out like fingers as we creep through the undergrowth on a dewy trail. Then he appears: Ronaldo, the bull elephant. The killer. A grey giant with sawed-off tusks and a festering wound on his back where his tail should be. Bitten off by rivals.

Ronaldo is one of about 200 Asian elephants living in the wild in Nepal. Some say he was named after the famous footballer Ronaldo because he kicks people around like footballs. Neither Balaram Chaudhary nor we want to end up in front of Ronaldo's feet. Slowly, the jungle guide turns and whispers, "Run!”.

Chaudhary runs ahead of us along the slippery path, water seeping into our shoes. A quick glance over our shoulders - Ronaldo is waving his trunk back and forth. He trumpets loudly. His ears flap, beating against the sides of his huge skull. The earth vibrates. Peacocks flee into the undergrowth, axis deer hide in the tall grass. As another elephant appears, Ronaldo loses interest, turns away and disappears into the jungle. For a while we hear the breaking of branches, muffled snorts and the squelching of the damp earth that gives way under the elephant's feet. Then the jungle is silent. We breathe heavily.

The sun is rising here on the edge of Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal. The park's protected areas and surrounding buffer zones are about twice the size of Berlin. Around 70 species of mammals hunt, graze and prowl in this jungle. Along with rhinos, tigers, leopards and sloth bears, an estimated 40 to 60 elephants live under the park's strict protection. The problem: the animals keep straying out of the park and coming into conflict with people from the surrounding villages. In the last 20 years, 412 elephant attacks have been recorded in Nepal - 274 people have died and 138 have been injured, mostly by single bull elephants like Ronaldo. He alone has killed or injured at least 22 people in the last eleven years.

So why do elephants attack people? How do locals deal with killers like Ronaldo in their midst? And what can we learn from these villagers now that moose and wolves (and perhaps soon bison and bears) are making their way back into central Europe, posing a potential threat to humans?

Fear lives in the villages

Som Dahedm Tamrey sits barefoot on the steps of his veranda in Badreni, a cluster of thatched huts on a dusty road near Chitwan National Park. Only a field of yellow mustard and the Rapti River separate the 42-year-old's home village from the jungle. The jungle is Ronaldo's kingdom.

Tamrey spreads a carpet on the veranda and serves steaming black tea in plastic cups. Then he shows a portrait of an old man looking into the camera. "That was my father," Tamrey says, running his fingers along the gold mouldings of the picture frame. "Like every day, my father would cross the river to the edge of the forest to herd the buffalo," Tamrey says. It was near the Breeding Centre, a government-run elephant breeding station, that his father first encountered Ronaldo. The animal was irritable and aggressive; workers at the breeding centre had previously thrown stones at him. On that day, the workers tried to scare Ronaldo away with burning torches to prevent him from approaching the female elephant living at the centre. Just 50 metres from the entrance gate, the elephant bull burst out from behind a thicket, grabbed the old man by his trunk and threw him through the air before slamming him to the ground. The attack lasted five minutes, according to Tamrey. His father's skull was cracked open, his arms were dislocated and blood was pouring from his eyes.

There are many people like Tamrey along the border of the national park, telling tales of tragic encounters with elephants, like Chhanu Man Mahato, a man in his early 40s, resting on a plastic chair outside his thatched hut. As ducklings scurry across the dirt floor between his feet, he recounts how Ronaldo killed his mother four years ago, at noon, after lunch, while he, Mahato, was at work.

Balaram Chaudhary, the jungle guide who has been taking tourists into the national park for 25 years, lost an acquaintance to Ronaldo. Prem Lama sells cola, beer and crisps near the breeding station. As he serves his customers biscuits on white paper plates, the kiosk owner describes how the elephant threw his grandfather through the air and crushed him to the ground. At night, the bull elephant wades through the river, breaks into Prem Lama's kiosk and eats bags of crisps, chews up beer and Red Bull cans, often whole pallets. Sometimes, says Lama, the bags of crisps come out the back in one piece.

A patrol to protect people from the jungle - and the jungle from people

About 3 kilometres from Prem Lama's kiosk, a barracks stands on high concrete pillars in the forest. Military uniforms hang over the veranda railings, and automatic rifles lean against wooden walls with peeling red paint. A barbed wire fence around the compound protects the people who protect Ronaldo: Nepalese army soldiers. Half a dozen of them sit in the shade of a corrugated iron hut in shorts and T-shirts, dal bhat, a dish of rice and lentils, in front of them. There are several camps of armed soldiers scattered around the national park and its buffer zone. The job of the armed forces here is to protect Ronaldo and the jungle from the people. And the people from the jungle.

"Let's go," says the sergeant, who wishes to remain anonymous. Uniforms on, rapid-fire rifles shouldered, 4 magazines of 28 rounds each in their vests: after lunch the soldiers set off on their first patrol of the day. The sun sends glistening rays through the leafy canopy, sweat runs down their backs. The soldiers' faces gleam as they march along a narrow path between ferns and sal trees.

A muffled thud echoes through the jungle. The sergeant grips his rifle. Leaves whip against thighs, rotten tree trunks crack under the soles of heavy boots, branches scratch faces as the soldiers break through the undergrowth. Axe blows come closer with each step. After a short sprint, the soldiers stand before a group of men and women carrying bundles of brushwood. "Do you have a permit to cut wood?" the sergeant asks the group.

Stinging nettles for diabetes, fern tops for salad, elephant grass for roofs: many people in Chitwan depend on the jungle. Part of Nepal's rapidly growing population is subsistence farmers, growing vegetables, rice and fruit for their own consumption. They also collect firewood in the jungle, a vital resource for survival.

"We are afraid of Ronaldo, but we need the wood to cook food," says one of the men, sitting on the ground in front of the sergeant in a tattered shirt. Collecting in the buffer zone of the national park is only allowed for those who, like the man in the tattered shirt, pay the equivalent of just under 40 euro cents a month for a permit. At 3pm the collectors have to leave the jungle, says the sergeant, shouldering his rifle. "For their own protection. Asian elephants rest during the day and become active when the air cools. If people are in the forest collecting wood at this time, the risk of a fatal encounter increases.

The grey catastrophe came at four in the morning

60 per cent of elephant attacks in Nepal occur outside national parks, less than 500 metres from the edge of the jungle. Sanichar Chaudhary and his wife Bhaiji Tharuni lost their home to Ronaldo in that 500-metre zone. Their hut - or what is left of it - stands among mango trees, next to a harvested paddy field with elephant tracks in the mud.

"He was here 4 days ago," says 70-year-old Chaudhary, a lanky man with a toothless smile and skin as rough as the bark of mango trees. He holds a walking stick and points to the side of the hut, about four metres long, where a hole the size of a garden gate gapes. Inside, a fishing net hangs from the ceiling, roots and dried mushrooms pile up beside it, and a half-empty sack of rice sits on the roughly made table.

At 4am, Chaudhary says, Ronaldo banged his trunk against the wall of the house while the couple were in bed - fortunately on the other side of the room. As Ronaldo searched for food with his trunk, Chaudhary and his wife thought they were going to die. After seemingly endless minutes of anxiety, Ronaldo grabbed two sacks of rice and disappeared.

Since the incident, Tharuni and Chaudhary have been living in a house in a neighbouring village. They plan to move back to the hut with the mango trees once the wall is repaired. She loves every single tree there, Tharuni says, but adds quietly, "It is very difficult to survive here on the edge of the jungle.

Shanti Maya Tamang also lives on the edge of the jungle. A 35-year-old with a round face, black hair and dark eyes, she sits on a wooden stool in front of her house, wearing purple socks with yellow flowers on her feet. In her hands she holds a picture of a baby, her son, sitting on a plastic chair in front of a flowerbed.

She speaks haltingly: In the evening, when it was already dark, Romeo, another bull elephant, stomped into the village. Tamang was alone at home, her husband had gone to the neighbouring village with others to chase Romeo away. The mother stepped outside with her son in her arms, determined to keep herself and her child safe. She had stored food in the house and knew that the thin mud wall would not withstand an elephant attack. As soon as she was outside the hut, Romeo attacked. The elephant bull grabbed the baby with his trunk, ripping him from his mother's arms and hurled him across the road. Tamang bent over her child, Romeo trampled her and disappeared without touching the woman.

After the accident, the family took their son to hospital. But it was too late. He was only three and a half months old. Tamang wipes her cheeks, looks across the river to the jungle, clutches the picture and presses it to her chest. "We buried him there" - Tamang points to the forest behind her house. Sometimes, when she goes to collect wood, she visits the grave, which is now overgrown with vines and bushes.

The human stories behind Ronaldo's attacks fill an Excel spreadsheet.

"Normally, elephants don't kill people," says Babu Ram Lemichhane, director of the National Trust for Nature Conservation in Chitwan. Lemichhane is standing in his office in Sauraha, a tourist town on the edge of the national park. The sound of birdsong and car horns wafts in through the open window. On his tinted glass desk, Ronaldo is part of a pile of papers: printed wildlife studies, brochures with colour photographs, an Excel spreadsheet that reduces encounters with the bull elephant to numbers and letters. Human destinies, compressed into 12 columns, A to L.

"Sex: Male. Age: 14. Season: Winter. Location: In the buffer zone. Activity: Displacement of elephant. Outcome of incident: Death."

"Sex: Male. Age: 11. Season: Winter. Activity: Went outside to use the toilet. Location: At home. Outcome of incident: Death."

"Sex: Female. Age: 74 years. Season: Winter. Location: In the forest. Activity: Gathering forest products. Outcome of incident: Death."

Lemichhane says: "Once elephants attack humans, they lose their fear. The key, he says, is human behaviour: If the human is respectful, the elephant is respectful. If people become aggressive, the elephants become aggressive. If people chase the animals away, for example because they are eating crops or food supplies, the elephants attack. "The conflicts are becoming more frequent and more serious because the animals' habitats are closed off like islands and they have no migration routes," he explains. Habitats are fragmented, people settle on the connecting corridors and come into conflict with the animals.

Nepal's population is largely rural and growing rapidly. The number of elephants is also increasing, "but the land area remains the same," says elephant expert Ashok Ram, who has published several studies on human-wildlife conflict in Nepal. The clashes, says Ram, often occur when the bull elephants are in mating season. During this time, testosterone levels in the animals' blood spike and the bull elephants are particularly irritable and aggressive, travelling long distances to find females and food.

73 compensation for crop damage, 7300 euros for survivors of fatal collisions

Relocation, electric fences, walls - there have been many attempts to defuse the conflict between elephants and humans in Nepal. Sunbahadur Tanang stands in a meadow and shakes a solution that is no longer feasible: the post to which several wires are attached is almost on the ground.

It is 7 a.m., mist hangs over the Rapti River and the air smells of wood fires and cow dung. Tanang is wearing a dark shirt, a baseball cap and carrying a bamboo stick. Dew drops form small puddles on his rubber boots. Three times a day, the gamekeeper checks the four-kilometre electric fence that surrounds the Badreni community on the border of the national park.

The wires are supposed to protect the village from rhinos, wild boar or elephants - but there has been little success. "Ronaldo just pulls the posts out with his trunk or knocks them over," says Tanang, pointing to a pole that has been knocked over. Almost every third day he finds posts that have been knocked over, holes in the fence or wire mesh lying in the mud.

"This could be it," says Tanang, pointing to a 1.60-metre-high, white-plastered wall of concrete blocks. The community has been building it for years to protect their village. But this solution is very expensive - and has a big disadvantage: "During the monsoon season, everything here is flooded. Then we even cut off the electricity. The wall, once we build it completely around the village, will keep the water in the community like a swimming pool. And even the concrete blocks are unlikely to stop Ronaldo: he has already broken through the wall further down the river three times and marched into the village.

The Nepalese government is also trying to counter the human-wildlife conflict in Chitwan with money: a state-funded relief fund is helping those affected to mitigate the damage. The problem is that when wild animals eat the seeds from the fields or damage property while foraging for food, residents are not compensated for the actual amount of damage. Instead, they receive fixed amounts: a maximum of 73 euros for crop damage, 1,500 euros for injuries and 7,300 euros for the families of those killed. If the damage is higher, the victims have to pay the additional costs. In addition, the process often takes several months, and victims are required to submit numerous documents. Those who are undocumented receive little or no money.

Like Sanichar Chaudhary and Bhaiji Tharuni: their mango tree hut was not officially registered, leaving the couple to deal with the damage caused by Ronaldo - for the second time. A year ago, Chaudhary says, the bull elephant destroyed the kitchen. He was able to rebuild it with his savings. Now, however, he does not know how he will be able to repair his home on the equivalent of 36 euros a month.

There is great respect for animals here, "even if they kill your brother".

A wall that is too weak, fences that are vulnerable, aid that is insufficient: why isn't Ronaldo killed? While countries like Germany debate whether to shoot wolves or bears, even though there has not been a single attack on humans since their reintroduction, a killer elephant roams Nepal largely unchallenged. "That's the big cultural difference," says Babu Ram Lemichhane, who manages Ronaldo's paperwork, sitting in his office chair behind the table with the tinted glass windows. "Elephants are considered sacred in Nepal."

Around 80 per cent of the country's population is Hindu. Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, is worshipped by many. When an elephant kills a man, he says, it is not the animal's fault but fate. "Besides," says Lemichhane, "if we shoot Ronaldo, the next bull will come. How many elephants do we want to kill?" There is a great respect for animals here, he says, "even if they kill your brother".

A combination of measures is the only way to resolve the conflict between elephants and humans, says expert Ashok Ram. Protective measures such as fences and walls are only short-term solutions; in the medium term, education on the proper treatment of wildlife and full and immediate compensation payments are needed to achieve a long-term goal: "Creating an environment for peaceful coexistence," says Ram. People must learn to understand why elephants are needed, he says. In addition to their cultural and identity-building function, the animals are also an economic factor in Nepal: tourists come to Chitwan National Park to see elephants in the wild. And tourists bring money.

Who is afraid of the wolf?

In Europe, there are no wild elephants and hardly any subsistence farming; man and nature have grown apart, unlike in Nepal. Can we still learn something from the people there about how to deal with wild animals?

Yes, says Arnulf Köhncke, a conservation expert with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Germany. The ecologist is sitting in the Top of the World Coffee café in the south of the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu; pictures of snow-capped peaks and mountain ranges in the morning light hang on the walls, apple tarts lie behind glass panels, cups with little sugar cones stand on the coffee tables.

A combination of education, prevention and support is the right way to create more acceptance for wild animals in countries like Germany, says Köhncke. Otherwise, he expects conflicts to increase in the future "if we don't do more". With the involvement of the public, he says, the authorities need to create acceptance and preventative measures at an early stage, even now, as the populations of wolf, lynx and elk, and hopefully bison in the future, grow in Germany.

"We have to educate people: how do I behave if I come across a moose?" explains Köhncke. The acceptance of people in Nepal, he says, is based on a long struggle; people are used to coming into contact with wild animals.

Maybe we can learn a positive attitude towards nature from them.