Elephants raiding crops create dangerous human-elephant conflicts that result in retaliatory killing of elephants and injury or death to people, requiring carefully designed coexistence strategies.
Human-elephant conflict creates welfare harms on both sides: elephants killed in retaliation for crop raiding die violently, often from poison, gunshots, or spearing. Injured elephants that survive conflict encounters may be permanently impaired. The psychological stress of navigating human-dominated landscapes affects elephant behavior and increases unpredictability. Community conservancy models that give local people economic stakes in elephant conservation fundamentally change the incentive structure, shifting elephants from crop-threatening problems to economic assets worth protecting.