Trust tries to use chili peppers to keep elephants away

KATUBYA, Zambia — Here's how to pitch this (true) story to Hollywood: Ordinary guy named John, ordinary Sunday, cycling home into a setting sun. A monster creature roars out of the bushes!

John abandons his bike, flees in terror. The creature smashes the bicycle, catches him in a few short strides, grabs him by the shirt. But he slides out of his shirt and falls to the ground.

The creature picks him up again, but John slips out of his trousers. Naked, too afraid to scream, he scrambles away. But he doesn't get far. The shrieking creature smashes him against a tree.

Camera pans to a woman approaching, unaware of the danger. Within minutes she'll be lying on the path, crushed.

The Hollywood twist?

These people live in a universe where the rampaging creatures — thousands of them — are protected and the people are not.

Cut to the creatures grazing peacefully along with their unbearably cute offspring.

To sell it, you'd need to change a few details: Lose the African villagers; make them suburban Americans.

And the monster creature couldn't be that beloved giant, the elephant.

Who would believe it?

The name of the dead man was John Muyengo, 25, from the village of Katubya in southern Zambia. The woman was Mukiti Ndopu, a respected woman in the village, the wife of the chief.

A neighbor, Muyenga Katiba, 44, saw the elephant charge Muyengo on that April Sunday. He gathered his wife and children and cowered inside his hut.

Population explosion

Deaths like these are increasing in southern Zambia and northern Botswana, where people are crammed in with a rising elephant population. There are no reliable statistics on the number of annual deaths in southern Africa, but in one region of southern Zambia alone, five people have died in 2009, compared with one in 2008, according to Zambian media reports.

Elephants, endangered in Central Africa, are common in the south, mainly because an international ban on ivory trading drastically cut poaching.

Today, Botswana has 151,000 elephants, and Namibia about 10,000. In southern Zambia, the elephant population has more than doubled, from 3,000 to 7,000, many of them "immigrants" from Zimbabwe, where poaching and hunting are rife.

The animals capture people's imagination because they're intelligent, emotional creatures. They mourn their dead and try to help herd members who get sick.

But as neighbors?

You pit yourself daily against highly intelligent, dangerous thieves. You go hungry as they eat crops. You're afraid to send your children to school or your wife to the clinic. But you have to go to town for food, and you walk the dusty red paths with fear.

If you get fed up and shoot an elephant, you'll be jailed, because the animals are protected. They're seen as valuable to Zambia, because tourists come, bringing millions in revenue to the country.

But people aren't protected. Nor are their crops or houses. There's no compensation when someone is killed. So people living in elephant country complain that governments and tourists like elephants more than people.

Albert Mumbeko, 76, a former railway worker who is also from Katubya, lives in a flimsy house of grass and sticks: That was the only barrier between him and a massive bull elephant that woke him and his wife at midnight a few months back. It was gobbling his small corn crop. Mumbeko crept out, heart beating wildly.

"I could see its eyes in the moonlight, big and fierce. It looked very angry and aggressive. Its ears were open."

That's an elephant warning.

Mumbeko and his wife fled, but the elephant stomped down their house and went on eating.

"We felt very angry, we felt very sad when we came back and saw our house destroyed."

When Mumbeko sees an elephant, he feels impotent fury. "We hate elephants. They're all bad."

Fascination, not love

It's a warm October evening, a good time for elephant-spotting in Mosi-o-Tunya National Park in southern Zambia. As the sky turns to slate, a group of elephants swims across a river. Suddenly, the exhilarating sound of an elephant trumpeting.

Dozens of elephants meander peacefully or wallow in the water. One old bull elephant splashes water over himself. Small elephants frolic.

One baby elephant, with mini-tusks, trots amid the matriarchal group. On short legs, it gets left behind. It curls its little trunk into its mouth and prances, breaking into a gallop to catch up with the group.

Several open-topped safari vehicles chug alongside, as rangers exchange radio information on the best elephant viewing amid the calls of birds, the engines and the ceaseless tweeting and clicking from digital cameras.

Seasoned elephant watcher Ferrel Osborn is awed by the creatures. That doesn't mean he's sentimental about them.

"I'm fascinated by elephants," he says. "But I don't love them."

He's not the kind of conservationist who thinks the real elephant problem is people, African overpopulation and habitat destruction.

He thinks humans can live with elephants, as long as they take a few simple precautions. One key is giving people a motive to try: At the moment, the revenue generated by tourism doesn't trickle down to those whose livelihoods are threatened by the animals.

His outfit, the Elephant Pepper Development Trust, hopes to preserve elephants by helping farmers protect their crops, reducing conflict and saving human and animal lives.

Four simple steps

The Zambia-based trust trains African farmers to repel elephants by using chili peppers. Elephants hate chilies.

African farmers often burn chili as a repellent, but it's not enough. The trust's method involves four simple steps but takes work and commitment.

The method:

• 1: Leave five yards of cleared space between the forest and the fields. At night, smelling humans around, crossing the gap into a field makes the elephants wary and nervous.

• 2: Plant a thick barrier of chili peppers around the field.

• 3. Put up a fence with rope that has jangling cans, which frighten elephants, and cloth flags coated with thick chili grease.

• 4: Burn chili peppers, making pungent smoke.

The trust will buy back chilies grown from farmers and manufacture Elephant Pepper brand chili spices and sauces, sold in southern Africa and soon to hit the U.S. market. (They are already available to U.S. customers via the Internet.) The profits go back into the trust.

"We say, 'We are not here to give you food or money,' " Osborn said. " 'We're here to give you an idea. It's up to you to take it up.' "

One Zambian farmer followed the method carefully and has successfully kept elephants off his crops for three years. It was so successful that his neighbors accused him of practicing witchcraft.

The most important long-term solution, the foundation argues, is for communities to stop settling and planting crops in established "elephant corridors."

"These corridors have been there for decades, so it's easier to move the farmers rather than the corridors," Osborn said.

Mumbeko has his own solution: If tourists love elephants so much, the government should fence them in.

"When I see one of those animals, I just know it wants to kill me."