Wild Nature Institute Hosts Elephant Fun Day & Demonstrates Chili Pepper Fencing!

Wild Nature Institute hosts wildlife Fun Days at schools participating in our Celebrating Africa’s Giants education program as a wonderful way to build community support for conservation. Last Friday our education team held an Elephant Fun Day at Baraka Primary School near Mtowambu. The event featured student-led activities such as Maasai traditional dancing, poetry celebrating elephants as well as ‘animal-bragging’ poetry, an egg-and-spoon race, a sack race, and making wildlife artwork—and we provided a delicious hot lunch of pilau and fruits for all participants. 

This Fun Day we also added an important awareness component: a practical demonstration on how to make and apply chili pepper powder on fences around farms to prevent elephants from eating crops. The chemical capsaicin in hot chili peppers irritates the elephant’s sensitive nasal cavities and trunk, and it keeps them from entering farmlands, thus reducing conflicts. We invited a team of experts from PAMS Foundation who facilitated the demonstration and took the community step-by-step through the process of making the fences. The kids got to sniff the chili peppers and it made them sneeze just like the elephants! 

In honor of elephants, Wild Nature Institute donated enough supplies to PAMS Foundation to build chili pepper fencing for an entire village in the elephant movement corridors near Lake Manyara. Local farmers from Baraka were very keen and excited about the knowledge they gained about chili pepper fencing, and they networked for future collaborations to facilitate their coexistence with elephants.

The event included 700 students from Baraka Primary School together with all 12 teachers and many community members. Please enjoy the attached photos of the event. As always, we are so grateful for the generous support of our donors to Wild Nature Institute so we can host these Fun Days to foster peaceful coexistence with Africa's giants. Special thanks also to our conservation partners PAMS Foundation for the great work they do for people and for elephants.