Orang Asli villagers in Pahang living in fear of another fatal elephant attack may be forced to set a trap to protect themselves if authorities don't act fast against what appears to be a rampaging elephant on the move.
Kampung Tual village chief Yok Ek Cantan said Wildlife and National Parks Department (Perhilitan) representatives had visited the village after a 15-year-old teenager was trampled to death on Monday, but have yet to take concrete action.
"Perhilitan rangers came to stay in our home and when we said there were tracks in the orchards, they told us to stay away and they would check it tomorrow. By the next day, the elephant had moved on.
"If they really wanted to do something to capture the elephant, wouldn't they have gone into the forest?" he asked when met at the village yesterday.
Yok Ek said the same elephant had been stalking his village along with half a dozen others in the vicinity over a period of a few months and it is believed to be the same one which killed a woman in Kampung Simoi in December.
Kampung Simoi, in the Ulu Jelai Forest Reserve, is connected to Pos Sinderut by dense forest.
Kampung Tual is located in Pos Sinderut, some 70km from Raub.
The villagers, who are from the Semai tribe, said the elephant’s tracks were spotted in their orchards and huts which were destroyed before the attack. Several days ago, a villager spotted its tracks nearby again.
"I am truly scared. This is not something small. I'm afraid to go to my orchard to collect durian. We now have to go in groups of four or five to do work in our smallholdings.
"It can come back anytime. We don't have guns or anything to protect ourselves, just blowpipes. But we can set a trap if we want to kill it.
"We may be forced to lay a trap if action is not taken (to capture it)," Yok Ek said.
Since the attack, he said the villagers have been on a self-imposed curfew and are terrified to move freely. This is especially since the village is remote, without telephone reception for emergencies.
There are less than 1,600 Asian elephants left in the wild in Peninsular Malaysia, with the number of human-elephant conflicts escalating amid increasing habitat encroachment.
Loss of livelihood
Yok Ek pointed out that this issue has affected the villagers' income, as they survive on selling the harvests from their orchards and foraging activities.
"In times of crisis like this, we hope the authorities can also provide us with emergency food aid," he added.
The teenage victim, Andy Yok Manin, was attacked when he was looking for petai with his brother and a neighbour.
The youths fled when they chanced upon the elephant in some bushes but Andy tripped on vegetation and was trampled and stabbed in the torso with a tusk, his brother Borhan told reporters.
Borhan, 23, who has not managed a night's sleep after the incident, said he heard his brother cry out but it was too late to help him.
It would be at least another hour before they could approach Andy, who was by then lifeless.
Their relative, Faizul Yok Tong, 22, who was with them at the time, climbed a tree to escape the elephant and was stuck there for more than an hour, paralysed with fear.
First time elephant entered village
This is the first time an elephant has been spotted in Kampung Tual, home to 280 families.
Pos Sinderut has 21 villages in total and all the residents are now living on edge.
On Friday, Cameron Highlands MP Ramli Mohd Noor's officers visited Kampung Tual to pay condolences and to brief villagers on how to know if an elephant is nearby, and what to do.
The MP's office is seeking a meeting with the Natural Resources Ministry to discuss plans to curtail human-elephant conflicts nationwide, which appear to be on the rise.
The safety briefing was appreciated by villagers who told Malaysiakini they have never before encountered a wild elephant in their lives, despite living within a forest reserve.
Forest clearing
Yok Ek, whose family has lived in Kampung Tual for at least five generations, said elephants started emerging in Simoi, an Orang Asli settlement connected to Sinderut by forest, around 2018.
This was also when the Hulu Jelai Forest Reserve started to experience wide-scale clearing, the village head said.
"There have been logging activities. The hills are bald now. These animals want to look for food," he added.
In the past months, the Pos Sinderut villages have experienced at least four incidents of elephant attacks, two fatal including the December incident in Simoi where a woman was trampled. The other incidents involved damage to properties.
Yok Ek has been in touch with other chiefs, including outside of Sinderut and found that the elephant had a pattern of moving from village to village every few days.
"We really hope something can be done. But they (rangers) came for two days and didn't even do patrols.
"If they had said, ‘Here's a shotgun, you lead and we follow’ we would be willing to do it," he added. - Mkini
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