The pre-eminent threats to the Asian elephant today are habitat loss, degradation, and fragmentation (Leimgruber et al., 2003; Sukumar, 2003; Hedges, 2006), which are driven by an expanding human population, and lead in turn to increasing conflicts between humans and elephants when elephants eat or trample crops. Hundreds of people and elephants are killed annually as a result of such conflicts. The long-term future of elephants outside protected areas, as well as in some protected areas, is therefore inextricably linked to mitigating such human–elephant conflicts, and this is one of the largest conservation challenges in Asia today (Sukumar, 1992, 2003; Hedges 2006).

Asian elephants live in the region of the world with the densest human population, growing at a rate of between 1–3% per year. Because elephants require much larger areas of natural habitat than most other terrestrial mammals in Asia, they are one of the first species to suffer the consequences of habitat fragmentation and destruction and because of its great size and large food requirements, the elephant cannot co-exist with people in areas where agriculture is the dominant form of land-use. In extreme cases, elephants have been confined as so called ‘pocketed herds’ in small patches of forest in landscapes dominated by man. Such ‘pocketed herds’ represent an extreme stage in the human–elephant conflict (Olivier, 1978). In other cases elephants have been caught and taken to so-called Elephant Training Centres where they languish, lost to the wild population (Hedges et al., 2005, 2006).

Poaching is a major threat to elephants in Asia too, although reliable estimates of the number of elephants killed and the quantities of ivory and other body parts collected and traded are scarce (Sukumar et al., 1998; Milliken, 2005). It has been argued that poaching is a relatively minor threat to Asian elephant because some males and all females lack tusks (Dawson and Blackburn, 1991). However, the reality is that elephants are poached for a variety of other products (including meat and leather) in addition to ivory, and poaching is now acknowledged as a threat to the long-term survival of some Asian elephant populations (e.g. Kemf and Santiapillai, 2000; Menon, 2002). Moreover, poaching of elephants for ivory is a serious problem in some parts of Asia (Sukumar, 1992; Menon et al., 1997). In Periyar Tiger Reserve in southern India, for example, ivory poaching has dramatically skewed adult sex ratios: over the 20-year period from 1969 to 1989 the adult male:female sex ratio changed from 1:6 to 1:122 (Chandran, 1990). Selective removal of tusked males has several implications for the affected populations: sex ratios obviously become highly female biased, genetic variation is reduced, and fecundity and recruitment may decline (Sukumar et al., 1998; Sukumar, 2003). Poaching of elephants is also a major problem in other parts of Asia. Large-scale hunting of elephants for ivory, bushmeat, hides, and other products has reduced their populations significantly over a wide area from Myanmar to Indonesia (Menon et al., 1997; Duckworth and Hedges, 1998; Kemf and Santiapillai, 2000; Martin and Stiles, 2002; Menon, 2002; World Wide Fund for Nature, 2002a; Hedges et al., 2005).