Tuesday, May 08, 2007

FROM POOH TO PAPER - NORTH DAKOTA COMPANY USES PRODUCT TO HELP ELEPHANTS IN SRI LANKA

World Wire press release
May 7, 2007

GRAND FORKS, North Dakota, May 7, 2007 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- Sri Lanka is home to about a tenth of the estimated global total of 40,000 Asian elephants in the wild. Elephants are not being killed in Sri Lanka for their tusks, as tuskers are rare; they are not being killed for meat, since no one eats elephant meat; they are not being killed for their hides, since there is no market for elephant hides in the leather industry. Instead, elephants are being killed simply because they interfere with agriculture. Since 1950, it is likely that more than 4,000 elephants have been destroyed as a direct consequence of the conflict between man and elephant.

The elephant is running out of space in Sri Lanka. Most of the protected areas inhabited by elephants are small, less than 1000 sq. km in size (900 sq. miles). Nevertheless, elephants, especially the bulls, may range over hundreds of square kilometers in the course of a season. Their sheer size and gargantuan appetite mean that elephants and people cannot live together where agriculture is the dominant form of land use, unless the damage they cause to farmers can be compensated.

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