Measures that seem intuitively obvious are, in practical fact, limited—by their expense and by the new problems they create. Electric fencing is a for-instance. You need enough of it to keep the herds out, but not so much that it blocks their migrations. Maintaining and repairing long stretches of fencing is time-consuming and costly and often doesn’t get done. Or is done wrong. The voltage has to be high enough to discourage an elephant but not so high as to electrocute it. On average, fifty elephants a year are electrocuted in India. And there is the considerable challenge of elephant
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