TEBO, Indonesia — Electrified fences set up around farms are an emerging threat to the critically endangered Sumatran elephant, conservationists told Mongabay Indonesia following a series of deaths this year in Aceh and Jambi provinces. Wishnu Sukmantoro of the Indonesian Elephant Conservation Forum (FKGI), a Sumatra-based nonprofit, said the death of a Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus) in Jambi’s Tebo district in May was likely caused by an electric fence, the first reported case in the province. “This is very dangerous, because the electric current can be deadly,” Wishnu told Mongabay Indonesia. In early May, the female elephant was found dead near the boundary of an oil palm farm in Tebo’s Bukit Pemuatan village. The elephant, estimated to be between 25 and 35 years old, was discovered around two days after it had died on the privately owned farm, which lies in a forest concession managed by a subsidiary of rubber producer PT Royal Lestari Utama (RLU), a unit of the Michelin Group. Sumatran elephants part of a conservation program to reduce human-wildlife conflict in Sumatra. Image by Rhett Butler/Mongabay. Officers from the Jambi office of Indonesia’s conservation agency, known as the BKSDA, forestry ministry law enforcers known as Gakkum, and local police seized inverters and batteries from the scene. The dead elephant was known to conservationists as Umi, the mother of several calves from Jambi’s Bukit Tigapuluh area. Umi had been fitted with a GPS collar by the BKSDA in February this year. On May 1, Umi and her…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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