Do you have problems with elephants eating your crops? If so, you now have a solution: put down some hot chilis and they’ll stay away:
A little bit of spicy chili peppers is all African farmers need to keep hungry elephants from stealing crops.
By planting a few rows of chili peppers around the perimeter of their crops, farmers have created a buffer zone that’s spicy enough to keep elephants, buffalo, and other hungry mammals away.
“Chili peppers are unpalatable to crop-raiding mammals, so they give farmers an economically feasible means of minimizing damage to their investments,” said Loki Osborn, project director for the Elephant Pepper Development Trust.
Farmers also can mix the chili peppers into a spray that drives animals away.
Chili peppers have been used to keep elephants away since 1997 because they were a cheap alternative to building expensive electric fences. And as a bonus, the peppers have turned into a valuable cash crop themselves.
“They can be grown as buffer crops to prevent crop-raiding and then be harvested and sold on the world market through the trust,” Osborn said.
And if the elephants eat the chilis, they come down with Uganda’s Revenge.
Psst! Did you hear about the elephant with Uganda’s Revenge? It’s all over town…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.