ANURADHAPURA, Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka carried out a nationwide census Saturday of nuisance wildlife, including monkeys and peacocks, in a bid to prepare countermeasures to protect crops, officials said. Some 40,000 local officials were deployed to count wild boar, lorises, peacocks, and monkeys near farms and homes during a five-minute period on Saturday morning.

In the north-central district of Anuradhapura, farmer families gathered in open fields to count the animals and record them in sheets provided by the agriculture ministry. “We are having census during a very short time period to ensure there is no double counting,” ministry official Ajith Pushpakumara told reporters in the capital Colombo. “We are expecting that the results will be about 80 percent accurate. After we have an idea of the number of these animals, we can plan out the next steps to deal with them.”

In Anuradhapura, 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of Colombo, residents were out early in the fields preparing for the census. “We had a very successful count from very enthusiastic participants. They are the farmers who continuously suffer crop damage. Our count was 227 toque monkeys and 65 purple faced langurs,” Chaminda Dissanayake, an agriculture department bureaucrat who conducted the census at Anuradhapura’s Mihintale area told AFP. Opposition legislator Nalin Bandara criticized the census, calling it a “waste of money”. “This is a complete failure, a waste of money. What about the pests that attack farms at night. They are not being counted,” said Bandara, adding that newer technologies could have been deployed for the counting exercise.

Officials say more than a third of crops are destroyed by wild animals, including elephants, which are protected by law as they are considered sacred. While elephants are major raiders of rice farms and fruit plantations, they were not counted in Saturday’s census. In 2023, the-then agricultural minister proposed exporting some 100,000 toque macaques to Chinese zoos, but the monkey business was abandoned following protests from environmentalists. Sri Lanka removed several species from its protected list in 2023, including all three of its monkey species as well as peacocks and wild boars, allowing farmers to kill them.

Killing or harming elephants is a criminal offence in Sri Lanka, which has an estimated 7,000 wild elephants, considered a national treasure partly due to their significance in Buddhist culture. However, the killings continue as desperate farmers struggle with elephants raiding their crops and destroying livelihoods. Many elephants have been electrocuted, shot, and poisoned. Sometimes, explosive-laden fruits are used to maim the animals, often resulting in painful deaths. 

However, Sri Lanka’s wildlife and railway authorities announced on Friday a series of low-tech measures aimed at protecting elephants, including adjusting timetables to reduce night-time train collisions. The measures came after seven elephants were run over on February 20 by an express train near a wildlife reserve in Habarana, some 180 kilometers (110 miles) east of the capital Colombo, making it the worst accident of its kind. — AFP