She can see from the garden the spot, back there by the eucalyptus trees, to which she hurried and immediately understood. Because it was so quiet, because there was a strange calm over the cruel moment.

Piyawan Daonan stands in her driveway, in Tha Thakiap, a district in the Thai province of Chachoengsao. She is 42 years old, mother of two children, a petite woman who can sleep at night almost only with medication and accompanied by nightmares since she became a widow. Without looking over herself, she points to the place, a few hundred meters away, where the elephant trampled her husband down.

She sits, her hair tied back, on one of the faded plastic stools in front of the house, scares flies out of her face and talks. From her husband, who went over to the plantation one day in May 2022 to harvest ripe cashews. Dusk sets in at half past six, which is why he always came back earlier. On this day, however, it was five, half past six, six in the evening. The sun was setting. In retrospect, Piyawan thinks she remembers hearing a cry for help, but perhaps, she says, the memory is deceiving.

She looks. Sees the harvesting equipment lying around. Sees the footprints of a large animal, ruffled grass, her husband's boots, one here, one there, his clothes. Piyawan fetches a neighbor. Together they find the husband's body, the body of Siripong Daonan, in her early 40s, lying on his stomach, lifeless.

Between 2017 and 2022, more than 135 people were killed by elephants in Thailand, and 15 this year. The animals often destroy most of the crops in the fields. Farmers get into financial distress, give up their jobs, move away.

Piyawan says that the elephant was still within sight of the scene of the accident, "he seemed excited, aggressive, like after a fight." As more and more villagers came to push the elephant back towards the forest. She herself stayed with her husband to protect him, at least for now.

Piyawan wears a soccer jersey that almost reaches her knees and is flocked at the front with two golden elephants, the logo of the well-known Thai beer brand »Chang«. Chang means elephant. In Thailand, elephants stand for strength and loyalty, for grandeur and wisdom. Successful companies advertise with the animal as a symbol. There is an image of the ancient Thai king Bhumibol, which hangs above the stove in many food stalls in the country, where a decorated elephant hands the king its long trunk. Until 1916, when Thailand was still called Siam, a white elephant adorned the national flag.

The elephant is the animal of the nation.

The elephant is the animal that has been causing death and devastation in Piyawan's homeland, in the provinces around Ang Rue Nai National Park, for several years.

2023: »Woman trampled to death by elephant«

2021: »Mango farmer attacked by elephant during harvest, dead«

2016: »Wild elephant kills villagers, herd raids fields«

2014: »Six dead in car accident, collision with wild elephant«

Piyawan Daonan grew up in the area. There were never elephants in the vicinity of people in her childhood, she says. It was only eight or nine years ago that the animals were suddenly there. Like many others, she doesn't understand: Why?

They have to be very close, Navee Cheachean says to the troops, pointing to the large prints in the dried mud. It's an evening at the end of March, and a group of men and women with headlamps on their heads are walking along the dirt roads. Cheachean is the president of the Chonburi Elephant Volunteers. There are dozens of such volunteer groups around the Ang Rue Nai National Park, something like a volunteer elephant fire brigade. Young people, men and women in camouflage suits, driving out to the plantations in their pick-ups. Smear anti-tick lotion on your neck and fortify yourself with duck curry and boiled eggs. 20-year-olds from the Thai villages where, when the sun has set and it sets early, not much else happens, except drinking a bit of beer and listening to music in front of the entrances of the houses. Now they hunt the animals out of the villages at night.

A farmer's wife called that she needed help, that the elephants were just standing in her grove and were after the ripe durian fruits.

Navee says, "No one is helping us. Politicians are looking the other way. We're the only ones who help the people here."

A helper says: "For this job you need a heart and not fear."

Before a wild elephant emerges from the thicket, before you see it, you can hear it. His deep, wet gasp. Perhaps you can hear a few of his footsteps; like roots break under its weight; how he stops again and again, listens, breathes, weighs whether he can step out of the shelter of the forest.

A bang, the volunteers twitch. The rest of the crew is a few hundred meters away and detonates balls filled with explosives, which they call "ping-pongs". They are supposed to scare the elephants without hurting them. The men and women surround the place where they suspect the animals are to be located from two sides, like a "V". Keep firing up the hill. Drive the animals out of the places that people claim for themselves. Sometimes until dusk the next morning. They defend the lines of civilization.

The story of man and elephant in Thailand is one of the struggle for space to live, which began in the last century.

If you had flown a drone over eastern Thailand around 1960, you would have seen this from the air: dark, dense forest. Half of the country consisted of jungle. If you fly over the provinces today, for example where the widow Piyawan Daonan lives, the camera captures: urban sprawl, hectares of plantations measured in rectangles. Rubber trees. Oil palms. Paddies. Sugarcane. Eucalyptus. Durian. In between, small settlements, the villages of the peasant families.

The forest in Thailand has shrunk by more than half in the past seventy years, while the population has tripled, driven by government initiatives. The aim was to populate the areas in the east, to use the land there as farmland in order to feed the growing population and export it abroad. Many people from other parts of the country moved to the area, cleared forest, cheaply acquired the cleared land, tilled it. The gigantic forest areas gradually became isolated green islands, enclosed by civilization.

At the beginning of the 20th century, more than 100,000 elephants lived in Thailand. At the beginning of the noughties, there were less than 3000 throughout the country. Thailand robbed the elephant of its place, and almost managed to exterminate its national animal.

Politicians reacted: what was left of the jungle was hastily protected, as national parks and reserves for wildlife. The Wildlife Conservation and Protection Act B.E. 2562 prohibits the hunting of elephants, they are considered endangered. Finally, the elephants had their peace in the forests. No one counted how many cubs were born.

But the protection of the wild animal worked so well that gradually the herds became too large for the reserve, hunger drove the first elephants out of the forest. Outside, they found fields full of pineapples and sugar cane, cassava, mangosteen, passion fruit trees, fields where the tender rice seed had just sprouted. Here they can eat their fill for days. They can quench their thirst because water retention basins can always be found around the fields. Rubber tree plantations offer just as much protection as the great jungle.

At the beginning of the noughties, the first elephants stood in the front yards of the villagers.

Navee, the leader, says the top priority: Don't get closer than ten meters to an elephant, or you'll be dead.

To tackle a problem, you first have to gauge how big it is.

Before becoming a leader, Navee had grown jackfruit in the area, which he exported to China, then eucalyptus. The elephants, he says, came every day. He had moved several times, different place, different harvest sequence, but the animals came and destroyed. Navee joined the local ranger. They found many textbooks on how to protect the elephant. They didn't find anything about what to do when the protection worked. So Navee studied the animals outside. When they go where.

And above all, he counted: How many wild elephants are there anyway?

According to Navee, there may now be more wild elephants living in and around the Ang Rue Nai Reserve than are officially known. 300 inside, 400 outside. Stocks have recovered well. A success. But politicians are reluctant to announce it, officially there are still a total of 300. In Europe, the wolf and the bear leave a trail of devastation, in Thailand the elephant. But if you count the wild animals, you also have to ask yourself this question: How much space does the animal have?

Navee quotes what he learned:

The distance that a wild elephant has to cover in nature to eat its fill every day: about ten kilometres.

Area of the Ang Rue Nai reserve suitable for elephants: 1000 square kilometers.

Navee says: It could have been calculated that it would eventually become too cramped for the animals inside.

Villagers are seeing baby elephants more and more often. Because of the abundance of food, the herds grow faster than in the wild – now by eight percent instead of one, rangers and forest officials estimate. The elephants take a liking to the habitat of humans.

There is an elephant named "Mango" who walks through the village at night and breaks into people's kitchens. The security guard at a construction site, who is often visited by "Ten Wheels", the largest elephant in the area, says that there is hardly an elephant whose body is not marked by human explosives, and that an elephant does not forget anything.

The government has erected hundreds of kilometers of fences and barricades around the reserve, some made of wire mesh, some of concrete, all meters high. But the animals push them aside like gymnastics mats.

There are operations centers of the wildlife authorities, in which surveillance cameras are evaluated, which show where and when elephants are traveling in which direction. But the animals are faster than the system.

Leader Navee says local politicians sometimes listen, those in Bangkok don't. The volunteers paid for everything themselves: the ping-pongs, the gasoline. Most of the time, they don't have insurance in case they get injured.

People still think that the elephant belongs in the forest. But that's no longer true. A war is over when one is much stronger than the other, Navee says. Or when two agreed on a compromise. The elephant can live with humans. Man also with him?

Politicians have given their answer: there are plans for a new economic zone in eastern Thailand. Companies are to be settled. Green space will give way to concrete. The battle for the distribution of space will become even greater.

There are proposed solutions. Rangers and scientists who find birth control would be a way to minimize herds. Elephant cows are bombarded with hormones from the air, which is expensive and time-consuming. There is the idea of corridors between the national parks and resettlement programmes in order to relieve certain areas, but they are not popular because the problem is then transported to another region.

In Botswana, where elephants have also multiplied strongly in recent years, targeted shooting of elephants is allowed again. But the shooting of the national animal, who would publicly demand that here?

The Asian elephant, up to three meters high, weighing up to five tons, the largest land mammal on the continent, has lived in Thailand for millions of years. The first ancestors of the Thai people set foot in the area 1000 years ago.

Man, Navee says, flies into space, looking for new planets to live on when Earth has become too cramped. The elephants, says the ranger, are not so different. They were looking for new places to live because the space that man has given them has become too cramped.

This research and the photographer were also supported by thePulitzer Center's Rainforest Journalism Fund.

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