For more than a decade, Sri Lanka has tried to address one of its most persistent wildlife problems by removing elephants from places where they come into conflict with people and confining them elsewhere.
The Horowpothana Elephant Holding Ground in Anuradhapura was meant to be part of that solution. Instead, the facility has become the subject of questions over elephant welfare, management, public expenditure and whether removing individual elephants can ever provide a lasting answer to the human-elephant conflict (HEC).
The latest controversy follows the reported capture of an elephant from the Thalawa area of Anuradhapura and its transfer to Horowpothana. According to reports, three elephants were involved in the operation, with two reportedly receiving anaesthetic injections and escaping, while another was captured and taken to the holding ground.
Conservation advocate Supun Lahiru Prakash has questioned whether the elephant ultimately captured was even the animal originally accused of causing conflict, as well as what happened to the two elephants that escaped.
For Prakash, the incident is part of a much larger problem.
“The recurring incidents surrounding elephant translocation show that this is not simply a matter of individual mistakes,” he argued, pointing instead to the fundamental weaknesses of a system that continues to remove elephants from their home ranges without adequately addressing why HEC occurs in the first place.
The idea behind elephant holding grounds was straightforward. Elephants identified as causing serious damage to human lives, crops or property would be captured, removed from their natural habitat and confined in a designated area where they could supposedly be rehabilitated before eventually being released.
Sri Lanka’s first attempt at such a facility was made at Lunugamvehera National Park in 2007. That initiative failed, but the concept was revived through the 2012 Budget proposals, which provided for four elephant holding grounds.
Horowpothana was established following Cabinet Memorandum No. 12/0151/549/001 of 17 March 2012. The facility, covering approximately 997 hectares, was constructed at a cost reported at the time to be around Rs 345 million and began receiving elephants in 2015.
It was presented as a more effective answer to the shortcomings of earlier attempts. The subsequent evidence, however, was stark.
A 2020 performance audit by the Auditor General examined the operation of the Horowpothana Elephant Holding Ground. By June 2019, 52 elephants had been brought into the facility, but only nine remained. Twelve had reportedly died and information about the fate of the remaining 31 was unavailable to the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC).
The audit also found serious shortcomings in the provision of food and the monitoring of elephants.
Between November 2018 and October 2019, a contract worth more than Rs 26 million had been awarded to provide food for 30 elephants. Yet the audit found that food was supplied even when fewer elephants were present. It also found that there was inadequate supervision over the weighing and quality of food supplied.
Five of the 12 reported elephant deaths had been attributed to lack of food and malnutrition.
For Prakash, these findings raise questions that cannot simply be answered by improving the day-to-day management of the facility.
“The audit findings show that the holding ground failed to achieve its intended purpose,” he said, arguing that continuing to send elephants there without addressing the fundamental problems amounts to repeating an experiment that has already failed.
Elephants do not simply forget home
One of the central problems with translocation is that elephants are not passive animals that can simply be moved from one location to another.
Wild elephant researcher Dr Pruthuviraj Fernando has repeatedly pointed to evidence showing that translocated elephants attempt to return to their original home ranges.
At a stakeholder discussion on HEC, Fernando referred to almost 25 cases involving lone male elephants that had been moved to supposedly more suitable locations. In most cases, he said, the elephants eventually returned to their home ranges, sometimes travelling more than 200 kilometres.
That creates another problem. An elephant attempting to return home may have to pass through unfamiliar villages and landscapes, potentially bringing conflict to communities that had not previously experienced it.
Fernando has also questioned the monitoring of elephants inside Horowpothana.
“Are elephants in Horowpathana monitored? How many elephants went in? How many remain there? What has happened to those that went in?” he asked in an earlier discussion about the facility.
The Auditor General’s findings make those questions particularly significant. The fact that the fate of 31 elephants could not be established was one of the most serious findings of the audit.
Fernando has also argued that the ecological conditions of the holding ground matter. Elephants require enormous quantities of food and spend much of their day feeding. Earlier reporting quoted him as estimating that a wild elephant can require around 200-300 kilograms of food a day.
A confined elephant therefore cannot simply be treated as an animal that needs to be kept behind a fence.
There is, however, another side to the story.
For former DWC Director-General Dr Sumith Pilapitiya, the continued use of holding grounds cannot be understood without looking at the political and social pressure placed on wildlife officials.
When an elephant repeatedly enters villages, destroys crops or threatens human lives, communities understandably expect authorities to act.
Pilapitiya has previously described elephant holding grounds as detrimental to elephant conservation and management, while also acknowledging the pressure placed on the DWC to remove so-called problem elephants.
“The main purpose of establishing an EHG is to satisfy social/community and political pressure on DWC to do something to contain problem elephants,” he explained in an earlier interview.
That creates a difficult position for wildlife officials.
Leaving a known problem elephant in an area where it is causing serious damage can expose both the animal and people to danger. But removing the elephant does not necessarily solve the underlying problem.
Pilapitiya has pointed out that previous translocations showed elephants trying to return to their original ranges. He has also questioned whether the habitat at Horowpothana is appropriate for maintaining a high density of elephants.
In other words, the holding ground can become an answer to a political demand for immediate action rather than a scientifically proven long-term solution.
The problems at Horowpothana have not stopped plans for similar approaches.
The Auditor General specifically recommended that the Horowpothana facility should first be made successful before another elephant holding ground was constructed.
Yet plans for another, much larger holding ground at Lunugamvehera have previously been pursued.
The question is therefore not simply whether Horowpothana can be managed better. It is whether the fundamental premise of removing and confining problem elephants should remain central to Sri Lanka’ s HEC policy.
Prakash argues that the country cannot continue spending public money on a model that has failed to demonstrate rehabilitation or a sustainable reduction in conflict.
Fernando’s research points towards the importance of understanding elephant movement, behaviour and habitat rather than assuming that individual animals can simply be relocated. Pilapitiya, meanwhile, illustrates why the DWC has continued to face pressure to remove elephants despite the limitations of translocation.
Together, their perspectives point towards a more complicated reality: HEC is not caused by individual elephants alone, and removing an elephant does not remove the conditions that produced the conflict.
Sri Lanka loses hundreds of elephants and dozens of people each year to HEC. The crisis is driven by shrinking and fragmented habitats, changes in land use, cultivation patterns, human settlement and the increasingly difficult overlap between human and elephant ranges.
Against that backdrop, Horowpothana represents a tempting solution. Remove the elephant causing the immediate problem and put it somewhere else.
But more than a decade of evidence suggests that the question cannot end there.
If an elephant returns home, the conflict may return with it. If it remains confined, its welfare and behaviour become concerns. If it dies, the country loses one more member of an already pressured wild population. And if the State continues paying to maintain a facility whose original objectives have not been achieved, the financial cost also falls on the public.
The Auditor General’s report did not merely identify individual administrative failures. It raised a much broader question about whether the holding ground was fulfilling the purpose for which it was established.
That question remains relevant today.
As Sri Lanka searches for a lasting response to HEC, the challenge may be less about finding new places to put elephants and more about accepting that elephant behaviour cannot be changed simply by moving the animal, building a fence around it or passing a policy.
The evidence from Horowpothana suggests that the country needs to ask a more difficult question: what if the problem is not where the elephant is, but the assumption that removing the elephant is the solution?
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