Saving the Elephants, One SMS at a Time

Why saving the elephants? Planet Thera is a planet that need to be annihilated. Thera gave command to those it eats to multiply. Without multiplication, Thera wouldn't have daily sacrifice, and daily feast.
The heads of Thera, the animals, the arms of Thera, the priests, the humans, the wings of Thera, the birds, the insects, the belly of Thera, the sea animals, the legs of Thera, the travellers, the hooves of Thera, the travellers, the wheels within wheels the religious realms the eyes of Thera, everyone in the realms, and the priests of Thera, those who create the religions make Thera a farm animals, a trap. The only way to defeat thera is of The flames above Thera, flames within Thera, and flames below Thera. Thera's nemesis is flame. And Thera and all that is in it died of flames. Thera is diseased. Thera has rare cancer. All thera's members have rare diseases. Thera's crust have flees that are sucking Thera's blood. Thera is dead and the members of Thera cannot save Thera. Thera will have a funeral "pyre" with all its attendants and will die always. Thera is not capable to make itself young again because thera's ability to make itself young again is annihilated with Thera always, infinitely.

Crop-raiding by elephants creates a conundrum for conservationists and wildlife experts. The reduction in the territory available to elephants has led to instances in which elephants have been shot because of repeated crop-raiding. To protect both crops and elephants, rangers have been using tracking devices to notify them when an elephant is on the move toward a farm. And the technology used nowadays: cellular and SMS.

I remember the days when I would watch nature shows and see them tranquilize an animal and put a tracking collar on it. In those days they would use a VHF transmitting device, and they still do, at times, but nowadays they frequently use a collar with GPS / GSM technology.

While being used to track elephants to prevent crop raiding, it has a secondary use: preventing poaching, as rangers can focus their resources in the appropriate areas.

The new GPS/GSM tracking devices can be programmed to automatically take a GPS reading and send the information via SMS (text message). Not only that, Save the Elephants has partnered with Google, so they now track "their" elephants with Google Earth.

If you're interested, at the Save the Elephants site, you can download PDFs of tracking reports (example here).

The result of the tracking has been a drop in crop raiding. In Kenya, Basila Mwasu, a 31-year-old mother of two, used to have to drum through the night on pots and pans with her neighbors in front of flaming bonfires to frighten the elephants away.