Nobody knows exactly what shocked the herd of elephants so much that they left the Mengyang nature reserve in southern China six months ago.

Since then, the 15 Asian elephants have walked more than 500 kilometers, devastating fields and causing turmoil in villages on their way, until they finally reached the outskirts of the provincial capital Kunming at the beginning of June.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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    "I am not aware of any other example in which these animals have walked this far," says behavioral scientist Dingzhen Liu of Beijing Normal University. He too can only speculate about the reasons. The growing population and their shrinking habitat probably led them to look for new sources of food, says Liu of the FAZ.The number of Asian elephants living in the wild in China grew from 170 to almost 300 between 2006 and 2018 due to the effective action taken against poachers . At the same time, their habitat has shrunk by around 40 percent. The Mengyang nature reserve, from which they set out, is actually sufficient in terms of area.

    In the meantime, the behavior of the still wandering animals is likely to be influenced by a completely different factor: stress. "I'm really concerned about that," says behavioral scientist Liu. The herd has become a media spectacle in China. Each of their steps is broadcast around the clock on the state television website. Camera drones buzz over their heads. Crowds gather along their route. Add to this the efforts of the police and local authorities to keep the elephants out of inhabited areas. Dozens of garbage trucks and trucks and tons of food are supposed to move them to turn back. Hundreds of police officers are involved in the action. In the meantime, Liu believes, the authorities have learned something new and understood how to calm the animals down.As evidence of this, he sees a scene that also attracted international attention last week: the elephants lay flat on the ground to sleep in a forest outside the megacity of Kunming.

    A working group of scientists and representatives of the authorities has recently been formed in Kunming to advise on ways of maneuvering the elephants into a suitable habitat.

    An anesthetization of the animals for transport, which had been considered in the meantime, was apparently rejected again.

    A voluntary return to the Mengyang nature reserve is relatively unlikely, not only because of the great distance, but also because of the memory of the animals, which apparently had an "unfortunate experience" there.

    As a herd isolated from a larger population, the animals would have a hard time, the researcher suspects.

    One problem could be that the elephants have changed their eating behavior in the meantime.

    They got used to eating corn and sugar cane.

    More than a million dollars in damage

    According to official estimates, they have already caused damage of more than a million dollars on their wandering.

    Conflicts between elephants and farmers have increased in China.

    There is now even an insurance policy that covers such damage - although hardly any of the injured parties have taken out it.

    Just in time for the UN biodiversity conference in China, the drama about the migration of elephants sparked a debate about better species protection.

    The conference is to take place in Kunming in October (albeit largely virtually), which gave rise to jokes that the elephants had run into the provincial capital to petition there on their own behalf.

    There are demands to set up a first national park specifically for elephants.

    Since 2015, ten national parks have been designated as part of a pilot project in China, which were opened in the past few months. The ban on trading in ivory is considered a success story for species protection in China. However, agriculture is eating its way deeper and deeper into the southern Chinese primeval forests. Rubber and tea plantations as well as medicinal herbs are taking up ever larger areas in the Mengyang nature reserve and are changing the local ecosystem. Roads, rails, dams and other infrastructure projects cut the forest areas into ever smaller areas. In May it was reported that another herd of elephants had left the reserve. You are currently working on the Botanical Garden of the Chinese Science Academy.