CAMPBELL: It is a sacred festival for the island’s most honoured creatures. Every year, carefully trained elephants parade through the ancient capital, Kandy. The largest carries what’s believed to be a tooth of the Lord Buddha.

For centuries, Sri Lankans have revered elephants as a symbol of faith, history and culture, but now they’ve also become the enemy.

JAYANTHA JAYEWARDENE: [Conservationist] On an average we about a hundred and twenty elephants being killed due to the conflict and about sixty five humans also being killed by elephants due to the same conflict.

CAMPBELL: It’s just a short drive from Kandy to where the wild herds roam. At the end of each dry season they converge on this lake in a national park. Thousands of tourists come to witness the gathering, but only from the safety of a moving van.

Now we can get very close to them but we are absolutely not allowed to get outside the vehicle. It’s just far too dangerous to be in the open with wild elephants around, which is a fine rule to enforce inside the national park. The problem is just on the edge of the park, a short elephant walk away, there are now literally thousands of people living in villages and the elephants just don’t realise they’re not suppose to go there.

As the sun sets, the fear begins for Premadasa and his wife Nadawathi. They live in a mud-brick hut alongside the national park. Like many subsistence farmers, Premadasa came here to escape the civil war in the north, where the government has been fighting Tamil separatists for more than twenty years. He and his wife now find themselves in a never-ending conflict with elephants.

NADAWATHI: If you try to chase the elephant or hit it when it comes near, it’ll attack you.

HUTCHEON: National park rangers give them firecrackers to try to scare off any elephants that attack their home, but Nadawathi’s too scared to use them and dares not go outside at night. Their next-door neighbour was killed by a wild elephant when he made the mistake of walking around after dark.

NADAWATHI: We can’t move forward… we’ll always be poor. We can’t grow anything even though we’ve lived here for 20 years.

CAMPBELL: Every night wild elephants roam through the surrounding countryside, even in the nearby town of Habarana. They loom out of the darkness then disappear into the jungle or someone’s garden.

In the morning, Nadawathi’s house is unscathed but her crops have been trampled again.

NADAWATHI: I got up in the morning and the whole banana plantation was eaten. So what do you do? You can’t cultivate anything. There were twenty coconut trees and they were all eaten. When they come, they destroy everything in five minutes, so there’s no point in putting so much energy into growing crops – all we’re doing is feeding the elephant!

CAMPBELL: So how big was the elephant?

NADAWATHI: He’s big in the sense that you have to look up like that. It’s scary to look at.

CAMPBELL: Like many who’ve settled here in recent years, they didn’t even know about the elephants. They don’t want them destroyed…

NADAWATHI: No… no… no-one wants them killed.

CAMPBELL: … but they would like the authorities to get rid of the elephant that terrorises them every night.

NADAWATHI: In reality, if it’s a killer elephant it’s no use. In that case they should kill it. Some elephants are scared, and when you shout they run away. But this elephant just hangs around. So people are scared of him.

CAMPBELL: In the last century the island’s population has grown from three million to almost twenty million. People have not only moved into the elephant’s territory but also destroyed their habitant, forcing them to forage ever further for food.

It’s part of a world-wide phenomenon of increasing violence between people and elephants. While elephants kill scores of Sri Lankans each year, villages kill almost twice as many elephants in self defence or retaliation.

Some of their offspring end up here, at an orphanage for elephants. Every morning they’re led to a river to bathe. Tourists enjoy the spectacle of a tame and artificial herd. Raised in captivity, they can never be released into the wild.

So this isn’t the solution, it’s a bit of a stop gap measure for dealing with this problem?

JAYEWARDENE: Yes it is a stop gap measure. It was a measure to look after the orphan elephants because nobody knew what do to with them but now, of course it has grown into large proportions.

CAMPBELL: Jayantha Jayewardene is an adviser to the Sri Lankan Government on elephant conservation. He believes the conflict now endangers the wild elephant’s survival.

JAYANTHA JAYEWARDENE: There’s a lot of complacency in the sense by the people who are suppose to look after the elephants and see to their conservation, but that complacency is, I think, due to the fact that a lot of elephants are visible wherever you go in jungle areas but there is certainly a major crisis.

CAMPBELL: When you see so many elephants here, you sort of get the impression that Sri Lanka is full of elephants and it’s not a problem.

JAYANTHA JAYEWARDENE: Yes, yes that’s just an illusion.

CAMPBELL: British colonialists hunted elephants to the brink of extinction for sport. Since independence in 1948, governments have tried to preserve their nation’s symbol but the number of wild elephants has dropped from twelve thousand to less than five thousand and conservationists fear even that number can’t be sustained.

JAYANTHA JAYEWARDENE: My feeling is that we cannot save all the elephants that Sir Lanka has now, but with proper policies, proper strategies, and proper management and conservation plans put into operation, I think there is hope for elephants – not in the numbers that we have but maybe numbers that could be sufficient to keep them as a viable population for the next fifty to one hundred years.

CAMPBELL: The plan involves relocating both people and elephants and capturing elephants that continually threaten humans.

JAYANTHA JAYEWARDENE: Not culling, culling means, denotes killing. It’s not killing that we’re talking of, it is capture of selected elephants that would be killed anyway out of the hundred and twenty per year that I talked of - taming them, it’s easy to tame an elephant, three to six months and you’ve got a very tame elephant from a very aggressive killer elephant – and then making sure that they are given to people who can look after them in terms of the management, in terms of food, in terms of finances.

CAMPBELL: It’s a controversial proposal. Elephants can suffer profound trauma from the loss of just one member of the herd. Young elephants are raised within a strong female extended family which stays together for as long as seventy years. They remain within five metres of their mothers for the first eight years.

Decades of habitat loss, poaching and attempts to move herds from their traditional areas, are already destroying these powerful bonds.

One of the reasons why Sri Lanka’s elephants have survived in such large numbers is that very few of the males have tusks. Those who do like this fellow Rajah, tend to have very short life spans and fifteen years ago he was attacked by poachers and shot in both eyes. He somehow escaped but when he was rescued, they took sixty five bullets out of his body. He’s been here blind and helpless ever since.

Against this, most Sri Lankans feel genuine affection for elephants. Koddithuwakku spends his life caring for this forty year old elephant that carries the Buddha’s tooth in the Kandy parade.

KODDITHUWAKKU: Elephants are better than people. They’re more faithful than humans. He’s a good animal, but when he gets angry he’s like a little child. For about three months in the mating season we have to keep him tied up to a tree. He’s bad tempered then.

CAMPBELL: He’s been a mahout or elephant trainer since he was twelve years old. They parade for ten nights and Buddhists believe that taking part brings good luck in the next life.

KODDITHUWAKKU: It’s a real privilege for the animal to carry the tooth. It’s a blessing for the animal, as well as for us. Elephants are like gems. There’s no point to a country without elephants.

CAMPBELL: But it’s hard to feel affection when you’re just trying to survive the night. Ratu Karunaratne stopped sleeping in his house after an elephant chased him inside and tried to knock it down. Like many farmers, he’s built himself a tree house where he beds down each night.

RATU KARUNARATNE: In March this year, at 3.15 in the morning my wife and I were in bed. I heard an elephant coming. I took my torch and went outside. The elephant started chasing us and banging on the windows. It pushed its way in and we only just got away.

CAMPBELL: He stays in his tree house to guard the crops while his wife sleeps in town. They moved here six years ago when the government gave out jungle land to help the poor. Now elephants or not, they can’t afford to leave.

RATU KARUNARATNE: The problem is that I’m settled here and so I don’t want to move. It would mean starting again from scratch, so it’s very difficult. I’ve built all of this myself, so I want to stay.

CAMPBELL: Jayantha Jayewardene believes such challenges will have to be met.

JAYANTHA JAYEWARDENE: In some areas we may have to take bold decisions. They will be political decisions to move people out of areas. This can be done, but we have to also see, and ensure that these men and families who are moved out of these areas are given even better facilities then they enjoy now.

CAMPBELL: As in much of the world, an exploding population of humans has created a war with nature but on the island of Sri Lanka, the deaths have not lessened the regard for the world’s biggest land mammal. For once, it’s a story of conflict that might just have a happy ending.