Challenge:
With their metabolism, elephants are required to eat for 16 or more hours a day. This translates into a lot of eating, and makes calorie rich crops especially attractive to roving pachyderms. This challenge is familiar to farmers near Liwonde National Park in Malawi, where elephants’ crop raiding costs farmers lost revenue and increases tension between humans and wildlife. With the risk of their crops being eaten at night, farmers were required to stay up through the night to scare animals away, and in some instances would be forced to take violent means to protect their crops.