KATHMANDU — Nayaram Sunar vividly remembers the day at the end of monsoon season in 2019, when rain was pouring in relentlessly on his sister’s corn field in the village of Madhuwan in western Nepal’s Bardiya district. A wild elephant (Elephas maximus) not only feasted on the harvest but smashed the family’s modest house. His sister and her children fled to a neighbor’s home for safety. “I felt terrible,” Sunar recalls. “That’s when I thought: Something must be done.” Sunar, 48, lives in Kailashi, a village nestled between Bardiya National Park and the Kailashi Mid-Hill Community Forest in Nepal’s Lumbini province. Here, human-wildlife conflict is part of everyday life. “We couldn’t even earn 5,000 rupees [$36] from 5 kattha [6,800 square feet] of land,” he says. “The crops didn’t survive.

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