Maintaining that its recent elephant population estimation exercise was “more precise” than the previous surveys, the Forest department has stood by its migration theory to explain the fall in elephant population, with their habitats in Kerala being contiguous with the forests of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu sharing an inter-State boundary length of 957 km.
While both block count and dung count methods were adopted for the exercise, it estimated populations of 1,920 and 2,386 elephants respectively. These were significantly lower than the respective counts estimated using the two methods in 2017 – 3,322 and 5,706.
Also read: Latest census reports a dip in tiger, wild elephant populations in Kerala