Cape Town - Herds of elephants, around 25 to 30 in number, have gone on a rampage in central Mozambique, devastating crops and injuring people, according to local reports.
The elephants have attacked people at night, in the towns of Metuchira and Bebedo, in the Nhamatanda district of Sofala province, according to a report by BBC News Africa.
The elephants are reported to be coming from the Gorongosa National Park.
According to ecologist Dominique Gonçalves, who focuses on elephant conservation in Gorongosa National Park, as the manager of the park’s Elephant Ecology Project, she tracks nearly 500 African elephants that roam the park.
Furthermore, she also monitors human-elephant conflict in the surrounding buffer zone.
Despite a troubled history, Gonçalves is confident that elephants and humans will coexist peacefully in the future.
“Coexistence takes time. It takes people to understand, and it also takes elephants to understand,” she says.
“I think the biggest thing that connects me with elephants is their empathy, their sense of place and family. It's very strong. They do anything to protect their family, especially the matriarchs and the females,” said Gonçalves, citing an article by the National Geographic Society.
Before the Mozambican Civil War, the Gorongosa National Park, which is located in the Great Rift Valley of central Mozambique, was home to more than 2 200 elephants. When peace was restored, their numbers dropped to less than 200, said the park.
But scientists say that the number of elephants in the Park is on the rise again and estimate that their numbers now exceed 1 000, said the park.
According to American nature magazine National Geographic, elephants once freely roamed around Gorongosa and the surrounding area with limited human intervention, but the 15-year civil war in Mozambique decimated both the human and animal populations.
Furthermore, more than 1 million people died, and Gorongosa’s elephant population was slaughtered for food and ivory to support the war.
IOL