A new study analysing two decades of organised crop-guarding efforts to deter elephants from entering farms has found a counterintuitive outcome: villages with active monitoring recorded two to three times more elephant deaths.
The elephant monitoring squads were set up in 2004 in Assam’s Sonitpur district where human-elephant conflict had led to high fatalities on both sides. The aim behind setting up the squads was to keep elephants away from human habitation to reduce conflict and hence reduce deaths. The study set out to find whether this intervention was indeed effective in decreasing deaths, but found increased elephant mortality instead.
The study findings however, need to be viewed with caution. While they show an association between an increased number of Antidepredation Squads (ADSs) and increased elephant deaths, they are not a direct proof of causation, notes WWF-India which helped set up these squads in Sonitpur.
The data shows that there are more elephant deaths in areas where ADSs have been deployed. The reason for increased deaths, says study author Nitin Sekar, could be that ADSs result in more regular, organised, and effective driving of elephants than occurs in communities without ADSs.”It seems plausible that ADSs result in more regular, organised, and effective driving of elephants than occurs in communities without ADSs, and that elephants being chased in this way are less attentive to their surroundings (especially since drives often happen in the dark) and are more likely to run into an electric wire or fall into a trench,” Sekar said.
He cautioned that there could be other explanations too to why the findings showed increased mortality. “We have pretty strong evidence that ADSs are associated with more elephant deaths. We have less clarity as to why,” said Nitin Sekar. Further, the number of deaths is actually a very small number of additional deaths — roughly one per year across the entire study area.
The researchers categorised the elephant deaths by reported cause noting whether the elephants had died by accidental causes such as electrocution, falling into trenches and other infrastructure-related incidents or by direct conflict-related causes. They found that the increased deaths associated with squad presence were largely accidental deaths rather than confirmed retaliatory killings.
Sonitpur in northern Assam lies within a key elephant landscape where forest patches, agricultural land and tea estates intersect with elephant movement routes. The region has long experienced recurring crop raids and seasonal human-elephant conflict, particularly during harvest periods when elephants move through agricultural fields.
“Those nights were dark, foggy winter nights, and a big herd of elephants (more than 80) was raiding the paddy crops. We used to spend almost the whole night helping and communicating with the community and the forest team involved in crop guarding,” recalls Hiten Baishya, who lives in Sonitpur. “One night, angry villagers were about to attack the elephants. I was trying to convince them not to drive elephants in the opposite direction and allow the elephants to take their natural route.”
A conservation practitioner with the non-profit Aranyak, Baishya was among those who helped WWF-India set up the ADSs in Sonitpur from 2004 onwards as part of their human-elephant conflict mitigation work.
“Human-elephant conflict was very high in Sonitpur during that time and there was conflict between the forest personnel and villagers too,” he adds. “We formed the ADS to improve the relationship between the community and the forest department.” He said that more than 20 human and elephant deaths occurred annually during that period.
The Antidepredation Squads, or ADSs, were created to organise crop guarding and reduce conflict, and hence deaths, in one of Assam’s most affected districts.
“The squads were primarily established to reduce crop damage and risks to people from elephants, with the understanding that they would also contribute to elephant conservation, because conflict would be better managed,” said Pranav Chanchani, Head of Species Conservation, WWF-India. Chanchani did not directly contribute to the recent study.
“In the early 2000s, captive elephants were deployed alongside some ADS units to actively ward away wild elephants, but these practices were replaced by other approaches that focussed on keeping crowds away from elephants, and helping local communities file compensation claims, on the one hand, while also using methods to deter crop raiding elephants, such as creating noise, on the other,” said Aritra Kshettry, Lead, Elephant Conservation, WWF-India.
The organised drives also replaced earlier uncoordinated efforts where the village residents would chase away the elephants. Baishya adds that since the chasing has stopped, it has reduced the number of calf deaths which would occur accidentally when calves would fall in tea garden trenches, for example, when being chased away. He further noted that elephant mortality in villages with the squads is perhaps higher because the squads were formed in severely affected villages with high number of elephant deaths to start with.
The study was published in 2026 in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology, led by Nitin Sekar and E. Somanathan along with their co-authors. It analysed long-term records of human and elephant deaths, detailed elephant movement data, and the rollout of ADSs across villages.
In assessing how the organised crop-guarding teams influenced deaths of both people and elephants, the researchers compared the same villages before and after ADSs were introduced, rather than simply comparing villages with and without the programme. This allowed them to examine whether mortality patterns changed following the intervention.
The analysis accounted for the fact that the squads were often formed after a human or elephant death, to avoid attributing pre-existing conflict levels to the squads themselves.
While the findings showed that villages with squads had two to three times more elephant deaths than when those same villages did not have the intervention, the researchers note that elephant deaths still remained relatively rare events across the study landscape.
The study also found no evidence that human deaths led to retaliatory killing of elephants. Instead, the data suggest that accidental mortality during pursuit may be a more significant driver of elephant deaths in this region.
The impact of the squads on human fatalities was inconclusive. “It’s not surprising that the signal was not clear in the case of human deaths since they are a rare outcome. The fact that it was in the case of elephant deaths is a surprising finding,” Somanathan said.
Even within the research team, the results were initially met with doubt.
“Naturally, there was a lot of skepticism about the results because they were counterintuitive,” Sekar said. “Even now there isn’t an internal consensus about the validity of the results because those in the field never received information of an elephant death that was believed to be caused by an ADS.”
But after reviewing the analysis, the decision to publish was not contested. “Once the [WWF-India] team understood how rigorously we’d arrived at the results and that multiple models all pointed in the same direction, there was never a discussion about whether the manuscript should be published.”
According to Sekar, while there were questions about methods, the primary concern was about the study’s scope. “The primary concern was about our study not showing the whole picture of what ADSs do, which we have addressed by emphasising that our paper only assesses effects on mortality, not how ADSs affect crop-raiding,” Sekar said. He noted that the study was also unable to assess community attitudes, feelings of safety, or the quality of relationships between local communities and conservation institutions.
The study did not include systematic data on crop loss, property damage, compensation claims, or long-term changes in community perceptions. As a result, the evaluation focussed narrowly on mortality outcomes, not on broader social or economic impacts of the programme.
The study found a statistical relationship between elephant mortality and ADS establishment, explained Chanchani and Kshettry. They say that even as this raises pertinent questions about the outcomes of human-elephant conflict management strategies, the evaluation did not causally link ADS actions to elephant deaths. “For instance, the study did not investigate the exact circumstances leading to the elephant deaths and this gap precluded attributing these incidents to ADS activities or other factors,” Kshettry added.
Talking about evaluation constraints, Chanchani and Kshettry agreed that rigorous evaluations are needed for all conservation interventions. But such evaluations often require data other than what may be readily available — and in the absence of relevant data, they may remain incomplete, and of limited utility in informing the planning and execution of future conservation actions.
While the study examined relative changes in elephant mortality following the introduction of ADSs within specific villages, WWF-India pointed to broader district-level trends over time, which showed that overall conflict-related deaths have declined.
Citing district data, Chanchani and Kshettry noted that WWF-India’s data from the five districts of Assam (Udalguri, Goalpara, Nagaon, Sonitpur, and Biswanath), where elephants caused the most human deaths, shows that Sonitpur stands out as the only district where human fatality numbers are declining.
“Between 2000 and 2014, 21 people and 12 elephants died annually on average. This reduced to 14 human deaths per year (33% decrease) and seven elephant deaths per year (42% decrease) on an average between 2015 and 2022,” the WWF-India 2024 annual report shows.
Baishya supports the view that the broader context matters. “The overall success of the programme is the reduction of HEC-related deaths (human and elephant) in the project area, which has come down from more than 20 to almost five to six per year,” he said.
Sekar believes this study highlights a necessary cultural shift towards rigorous evaluation in conservation. “Naturally, there was a lot of scepticism about the results because they were counterintuitive,” he noted, adding that once the team saw the statistical rigour, they prioritised transparency. However, he emphasised that because the study did not measure variables like crop-raiding or community attitudes, it remains unclear whether the squads produced benefits or costs in those specific areas.
Chanchani and Kshettry emphasise the importance of evaluating interventions within specific ecological and social contexts, rather than assuming results will apply uniformly across regions. “Successful interventions to manage conflicts are always place-based and locally relevant. Hence, the findings may not be directly relevant to other areas as there are considerable social, ecological and political variations even between adjacent districts in Assam,” Chanchani and Kshettry noted.
“The hard reality is that when elephants enter settlements or crop fields, they will be repelled,” Chanchani and Kshettry said. “ADSs are designed to reduce such risks and losses, and to be sure, their intended purpose is also to make human-elephant interactions more benign.”
They also stated that “perpetually elephant chasing in crop fields is not an optimal solution,” and called for policies that enable elephants to be “chased less and tolerated more.”
Read more: Fragmented forests and human disturbances create stress in elephants
Banner image: A herd of elephants at a tea estate in Golaghat district, Assam. Representative image by Donvikro via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Aditi Tandon Senior Production Editor
This article was originally published on Mongabay India and has been republished here with permission.