Immediate behavioural responses of humans and Asian elephants in the context of road traffic in southern India

With expanding human populations, exponentially increasing motor vehicles, and public roads running through Protected Areas, road traffic is becoming an increasing concern in many countries. While studies have traditionally examined the role of highways in fragmenting and decimating animal populations, we carried out one of the first studies of the immediate behavioural responses, rather than inferring eventual consequences, of motorists and wildlife towards each other. We inspected variables such as vehicle size, type, and origin, and elephant group composition, amongst others, to study motorist–elephant responses along highways in Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary, southern India. Based on 1521 motorist–elephant interactions, we found higher odds of more severe to less severe motorist response in passenger (versus goods) vehicles, visiting (versus local) vehicles, and in vehicles of particular size classes. Overall, elephant responses to vehicles increased in severity with increasing vehicle size and motorist response. Although motorists in heavy vehicles caused the least disturbance, elephants were most affected by heavy vehicles (because of their size) and generally tolerated smaller vehicles, even those that created significant disturbance. We suggest that an understanding of sensory biases of animals is important in the management of human–wildlife conflict as these could lead to the outcome of interactions being contrary to expectation. This is also one of the first uses of ordinal multinomial generalized linear models to studies of human–wildlife conflict, and we suggest its application to the data often obtained in this field.