Thermal drones are launched. Artificial intelligence and acoustic sensors are activated to pinpoint targets. Armed rangers are sent out on patrols.

Such innovations have found their way into the arsenals of many warring nations, but technology is increasingly being deployed in a conflict of another kind — between elephants and their deadliest enemy: man.

Elephant wars are being waged in 13 countries across Asia and more than 20 in Africa. In Asia, India harbors the continent’s largest elephant population and suffers the most casualties among both pachyderms and humans. No fewer than 121 of India’s estimated 30,000 wild elephants were killed in the year to March 2024, along with 629 people, according to government statistics. In Sri Lanka, the conflict claims the lives of some 100 humans and 400 elephants each year, according to Mongabay, a U.S. environmental news portal.

The roots of this tragedy are clear. Robbed of their natural habitats by the felling of forests, agricultural expansion and other human encroachments, elephants must starve or venture out of their traditional homes to find food. When they do, death and destruction result.

Tarsh Thekaekara, a co-founder of The Shola Trust, a conservation charity in southern India, says that new technologies need to be combined with traditional methods of warding off marauding elephants. These include setting off firecrackers, beating drums, wielding torches and erecting fences smeared with chili paste.

“Ideally, tech-based systems should be used to support field staff, not replace them,” he says. “The real test of these tools is not their technological sophistication, but whether they’re deployed thoughtfully.”

After profiling elephants in the Nilgiris area of Tamil Nadu state, Thekaekara created an app that allows frontline staff to distinguish between elephants that are truly causing trouble and those that are not. This means that only problematic elephants need to be chased off. As a result, human fatalities in the area have dropped from up to 12 a year to four at most.

Aggressive elephants can pose serious problems. They have ravaged tea plantations, rice fields and fruit orchards, and stridden boldly into towns, damaging computers in schools, crushing parked cars, disrupting sports training and halting trains. Rural inhabitants, often living a marginal existence, are by far the most numerous victims, but forest rangers also die.

Some humans are killed by accident, others by angry, seemingly unprovoked elephants. In turn, elephants are electrocuted on solar fences and electrical wires, felled in train accidents and succumb to poaching and poisoning. In some of India’s eastern and central states improvised explosive devices planted by Maoist guerrillas have also taken a toll.

Many schemes are in operation to avoid elephant deaths. In some areas Indian Railways is employing an AI-enabled distribution acoustic sensing system to detect elephants that are near or on railway tracks. The system alerts locomotive drivers, station masters and control rooms so that preventive action can be taken to avoid collisions.

This has reduced railway-related deaths by more than 50%, according to Indian Railways. The government-owned railway operator is also using thermal vision cameras to detect wild animals on straight track sections during the night and at times of poor visibility.

In the eastern state of Odisha, the forest department has installed an early warning system in 23 vulnerable villages. Officials monitoring events from a control room can activate audio announcements when elephants are detected by drones, AI cameras or patrols. A sound system set atop tall poles and powered by solar energy warns villagers of elephants in their area.

Despite such initiatives, a government report notes that India’s elephant population dropped by 20% between 2017 and 2022. Similar declines are being recorded in other Asian countries. But ending the conflict between elephants and humans is a complex and delicate matter.

Alexandra Zimmermann, who heads a group dealing with human-wildlife conflict at the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature, says elephants need to move across large areas and “any technology which helps to know where they are is helpful.”

However, she adds, “the root solution is to resolve tensions between communities living with wildlife and those who want to protect wildlife; the needs of affected communities must be heard and understood.”

Zimmerman says that a major part of the conflict arises from governments and environmentalists “repeatedly and explicitly putting elephants first,” which suggests to the communities that their lives matter less than those of the animals. Addressing this problem is more important than the temptation “to jump straight into technological solutions,” she says — especially those that try to block elephants using noise or other methods of scaring them.

The widespread conflict between humans and pachyderms can be seen clearly in the Elephant News Service run by Save the Elephants, a Nairobi-based charity, which provides daily online information from a number of countries. The stories are invariably heartbreaking.

In northwest Sri Lanka, a 15-month-pregnant elephant died this year after being electrocuted by a wire encircling a coconut plantation. Officials said that the unborn elephant was destroyed by the electric shock and attempts by veterinarians and forestry officers to treat the mother failed. She was discovered standing in a river, probably seeking relief from pain by immersing her trunk and mouth in the water. She could not be moved, even when other elephants were brought to assist her.

There were angry calls from the public for justice for the elephant and her unborn calf, and the coconut farmer was arrested.

In Bangladesh, a pregnant woman was killed by an angry elephant that broke into her home in Cox’s Bazar this year. When a herd of wild elephants approached, the family’s pet dog tried to attack a calf. Enraged, one of the other elephants entered the house and killed the 35-year-old woman, striking her with its trunk. The herd did not harm her four young children, who were with their mother when she died.

From time to time, stories of affection between man and pachyderm emerge. In Thailand, a wild elephant with a sweet tooth recently strolled into a town near the Khao Yai National Park. With a reputation for visiting homes to snatch some snacks, Plai Biang Lek, as locals call him, entered a grocery store to browse its shelves.

After leaving he feasted on nine bags of sweet rice crackers, a sandwich and some dried bananas. Local media reports noted that the shop owner appeared amused even though the theft cost her about 1,000 baht ($31).

Perhaps the most effective instrument in the elephant wars is the human heart. When elephants or humans are killed, villagers will sometimes protest, but their anger is often directed not against the elephants but against officials for failing to prevent such incidents. In India and some other Asian countries, elephants are widely seen as sacred. Hinduism regards elephants as reincarnations of the three-headed elephant deity Ganesh.

“What I find remarkable is that despite the increasing damage and rising human fatalities, there are relatively few calls for retaliatory killing or mass capture of elephants,” Thekaekara says. “The level of human tolerance in India is, frankly, extraordinary.”

However, this tolerance is under strain as villagers suffer repeated destruction of their crops. Some have resorted to shooting the raiders or inserting poison or even explosives into fruits and other food items. Already endangered, wild elephants are retreating and may vanish from the Asian landscape.