Copyright 2001 Reuters
November 21, 2001

HANOI, Vietnam — Malaysian and Vietnamese foresters plan to resume a roundup of elephants from a killer herd in southern Vietnam, suspended after two elephants died in the operation last week, an adviser to the project said on Monday.

Frank Momberg, Indochina director of Fauna and Flora International (FFI), said the government had stated that the remaining five or six members of the herd terrorising Binh Thuan province would be shot unless they were caught by the end of December.

The herd, forced out of its natural habitat by human encroachment, is blamed for the deaths of 12 people in the province in the past three years, after taking to raiding crops and villages for food.

Hoping to avoid a cull, FFI arranged for eight experts from the Malaysian Forestry Department to attempt to round up the herd using tranquilizer darts and move it to Yok Don National Park in the nearby Daklak province.

The $233,000 operation was suspended last week after two elephants drugged with the darts died, both of suffocation. One died after stumbling on a steep hillside trying to escape and the other after falling over a tree stump, having been startled at night by journalists.

Momberg said he expected the roundup to resume this week after the government agreed to send 30 soldiers to provide security.

He said the operation was one of the most difficult of its kind ever mounted, given the steep, rocky terrain in Binh Thuan; the population density there; and the strength of the elephants after years of feasting on crops like sugar cane.

He said the Malaysians had rounded up 400 elephants in the past and had never encountered such tricky terrain. "It's an extraordinarily difficult situation,'' he said, adding that there was a risk more of the elephants could die if they tried to escape up steep hillsides after being tranquilized.

"But there's no choice: You either relocate them, or they will end up being culled because the government is responsible to its citizens,'' he said. "Just two weeks ago another person was killed, and you can predict that more people will be killed if nothing is done.''

Momberg said the success of the operation would rely on being able to tranquilize the elephants on open ground early in the morning and hope that the drugs brought them to a halt before they attempted to escape via the dangerous rocky slopes.

FFI estimates Vietnam had just 86 elephants left in the wild compared with about 500 in the early 1980s. He said elephants in Vietnam had suffered first at the hands of ivory poachers, then from encroachment into their habitats by farmers and loggers. Error: Unable to read footer file.