Unfortunately, in many parts of the world wild animals and humans are coming closer and closer in where they live. Due to our wasteful lifestyle, our leftovers can provide good pickings for wildlife though this often leads to conflict.
In Sri Lanka some of the elephants of started trying to find food in human landfill sites. This is obviously bad for them as they can end up eating plastics and other things by mistake. At the moment dozens of elephants are visiting the dump a day, and something needs to change in order for this to reduce
The behaviour is unfortunately encouraged by the way that the government has allowed these landfill sites to become established so near the wild areas.
Various solutions are being proposed, however what is clear is that the animals and humans should be living further apart – and unfortunately this is not the elephants fault, this is what happens when villages are built within elephant territory.
At the moment a moat is being dug around the landfill, which will be full of water. Elephants are good swimmers so time will tell if this will be successful in changing their behaviour.
