The Cognition Of Community Inhabitants To Asian Elephant Trouble And Conservation In Xishuangbanna, Southwest China

Wild elephant trouble is a generally tough problem. It means elephant get into thearea of human activities to damage crops, houses and infrastructures, and injure humanand livestock, and damage structure of plant community and species diversity. There area lot of scientific researches in the reasons, results and methods to reduce elephanttrouble, but they were scanty of deep-going researches related to community inhabitantsand their subsistence and development. This study stared from July 2009 to February2010 in 22 countries, classified to 4 sub-research areas in Mengyang, Mengla andShangyong sub-reserve. We interviewed with villagers to researched their attitudes toelephant trouble and conservation and demands of community development. Theconclusions as follows.(1) Increasing of population and area of planting and decreasing of habitat is thefirst reason of Asian elephant trouble. The unification of industrial structure especiallyrubber(68.61% of community incomes come from rubber) promotes the expanding ofplanting, leading to more serious human-elephant conflict(HEC). Population or totalplanting area is highly significant positive correlation with Asian elephant trouble, thecoefficient of correlation is 0.716 or 0.559.(2) Community inhabitants believe that shortage of food is the main reason ofAsian elephant trouble. 56.07% of inhabitants think that Asian elephant like crops,36.89% think lack of food, and only 7.04% of inhabitants think lack of cover.(3) The correlation between the attitude of community inhabitants to elephanttrouble and the relationship between human-elephant or the attitude of processingmethod is positive correlation, the coefficient of correlation is 0.381 or 0.205.(4) In community inhabitants' view, the method of reducing HEC is reduces thepopulation of Asian elephant around countries. 55.83% of inhabitants think elephantshould move out, 64.56% of inhabitants feel we should use electric rail and trenchagainst elephant and so on to separate human from elephant.(5) The beneficiary and the relationship between human-elephant have a stronginfluence on the attitude of community inhabitants to Asian elephant conservation, with a influence coefficient of -0.288 and 0.261. There are 66.50% of inhabitants willing toparticipate in Asian elephant conservation, because of responding to appeal ofnation(29.13%) or compelled to policy(23.78%). 29.62% of inhabitants who not willingto participate conservation with the reason of Asian elephant will endanger to countries.Therefore, the author believes that, first of all, the critical problem of Asianelephant conservation and reducing HEC is protecting personal interest, balancingcommunity's interests getting and losing in Asian elephant conservation and trouble isthe base of reducing HEC. The second, accurately guiding community inhabitants torecognize the reason of Asian elephant trouble and the negative influence of agricultureproduction. Finally, removing agriculture production in the frequent area of Asianelephant trouble gradually, helping community inhabitants to find other livelihoods.