PREVIEW

**MANDATORY CREDIT: Tharmapalan Tilaxan/Cover Images**

These harrowing images of elephants foraging for food on a Sri Lankan garbage facility were captured by Tharmapalan Tilaxan, a Jaffna-based photographer.

Elephants normally travel over 30 km per day and seed up to 3500 new trees a day. For the Oluvhil Palakadhu elephants many things have changed and their changed behavior will change our landscape. Tharmapalan Tilaxan has observed this open garbage dump amidst the jungles of the Eastern Province for many months and documented the hazards this poses to the local elephant population.

He explains the scenes in his own words:

In the eastern province, a herd of wild elephants have picked up a peculiar—and sad—habit: Since of late, these elephants have been seen foraging for food in garbage dumps.

One garbage dump—situated near an area near known as ‘Ashraf Nagar’ close to the forest bordering the Oluvil-Pallakadu area in the Ampara district—is considered the cause of this new, destructive and unhealthy habit.

Garbage from Sammanthurai, Kalmunai, Karaitheevu, Ninthavur, Addalachchenai, Akkaraipattu and Alaiyadi Vembu is dumped here, and has slowly encroached on the adjacent forest, becoming easily accessible to the wild elephants of Oluvil.

As a result of unintentionally consuming microplastics and polythene, large quantities of undigested pollutants have been found in the excretion of these wild animals. A number of postmortems carried out on elephant cadavers have yielded plastic products and non-digestive polythene in their stomach contents.

The herd of wild elephants—numbering about 25-30—now accustomed to feeding so close to human habitat have also begun to invade nearby paddy fields and villages seeking more food adding more tension to the already fraught relationship between the villagers and the wild animals.

Despite a number of roundtable discussions with authorities that arrived at many solutions — including the construction of a reinforced fence around the garbage dump — no action has been taken to prevent the wild elephants of Oluvil from entering the urban areas in search of food, predominantly in garbage dumps.

The frequency of elephant casualties is a call to all stakeholders to unite and arrive at a solution that will resolve this issue as soon as possible.