As elephant ranges shrink and human settlements expand, conflict over crops and water creates welfare costs for both elephants and rural communities across sub-Saharan Africa.
Human-elephant conflict creates welfare harms for individual elephants through wounds, poisoning, capture, and lethal control. Elephants involved in conflict may be shot non-lethally, survive with embedded bullets or spear wounds, and continue in pain while remaining a conservation and conflict liability. Coexistence programs that provide effective non-lethal deterrents — chili barriers, beehive fences, early warning systems — reduce both human losses and the welfare costs to individual elephants involved in conflict events. These approaches represent a convergence of welfare, conservation, and community development interests that effective wildlife management should exploit.