Malaysia’s elephants stay more outside protected areas than in

Way back in 1999, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a doyen of research into African elephants, made an intriguing discovery. Using the Global Positioning System (gps) to track them—a first—he found that they knew exactly where the boundaries of protected areas were. They ranged freely within these areas, but when crossing between them, through apparently similar but unprotected habitat, they did so at night and at what was (for an elephant) a gallop.