THE British and American tourists dismounting elephants on the banks of the Zambezi were all agreed: the elephant-back safari had been the highlight of their African holiday. There was a chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” and a rush for cameras as an eight-month-old baby elephant that had followed them, gambolled clumsily in and out of her mother’s massive legs.

But behind the picture-book scenes a war is under way. Many people in Zambia and other parts of Africa are living in terror of elephants, which are becoming increasingly aggressive. Scientists believe they may be seeking revenge for the culling of their parents.

The once sleepy town of Livingstone is now a front line in a growing conflict between elephants and humans competing for habitat. The settling of people closer and closer to the national park, combined with an influx of elephants from across the border in Zimbabwe, where economic collapse has led to unbridled poaching and empty waterholes, produces almost daily clashes.

At the office of the Zambia Wildlife Authority, a large blackboard on the wall is chalked with recent incidents of elephants in villages, sometimes marked “threat to life”.

“We are working flat out,” says Fritz Mubanga, senior wildlife police officer, who has worked there for 12 years. “Almost every day we’re having to send an officer to stay somewhere until the elephant moves on. A few years ago there was nothing like this.”

Villagers are not only losing their crops but in some cases their lives. Last year Jacqueline Lyamba, 25, and her two-year-old daughter, were killed in Nakatindi township while her six-year-old son crouched behind a bush in terror. On the other side of the border in March a British mother and daughter were trampled to death on holiday in Hwange national park. Last month an elephant overturned a truck on the highway.

“I see it as my mission to convince the world that elephants are horrible things to live next door to,” says Dr Loki Osborn, a biologist and member of the Human-Elephant Conflict Working Group of the World Conservation Union.

“Westerners have this romantic vision of elephants. If you live in a place where there aren’t any you love them, but if you live somewhere where they’re a menace you hate them.”

Now, with Osborn’s help, locals are trying to fight back with an unlikely weapon – chilli.

“Chillis are to elephants what garlic is to vampires,” he explained. “Give them a whiff and they will dance around like cartoon characters, flaring their ears, shaking their heads, blowing out air and trumpeting.”

His organisation, the Elephant Pepper Development Trust, based in Livingstone and funded in part by the US Wildlife Conservation Society, promotes the use of chilli to drive hungry elephants away from crops.

“Their whole trunk is coated with a mucous membrane, and elephants have 100 or 150 times better sense of smell than humans,” he says. “Their eyesight is very poor and they get all their information through their trunks. So when they breathe in even very small amounts of capsicum that you get when you burn a chilli, their whole trunk is stimulated and it drives them crazy.”

A self-confessed elephant fanatic, Osborn got the idea when he heard about a Vietnam veteran in Montana with a grizzly bear problem who had tried to find an alternative to guns. He developed a capsicum aerosol and in 1991 Osborn took it to the Zambezi valley where he was astonished by the reaction.

Since then he has taught thousands of farmers to plant chilli pepper buffer zones around their fields and to make what he calls dung-bombs from ground-up peppers mixed with elephant dung. When these are burnt, they emit spicy smoke.

“It’s like tear gas to elephants,” says Roy Kaanga, a farmer, his hands black with chilli grease he is using to oil a string fence around his crops as a first line of defence. Round the edge of his fields are chilli bushes. Drying on the ground are some briquettes of fresh elephant dung that he has collected and mixed with pounded chilli.

“If an elephant comes near, it runs like a jet,” he laughs. He turned to chilli in desperation in 2005 after nights when as many as 50 or 60 elephants rampaged over his land, destroying maize and vegetables.

The traditional methods of banging pots and pans, setting off firecrackers and lighting fires had all failed. “Now I light these bombs at 10pm and they burn for eight hours and Mr Kaanga is safe and can rest with my beautiful family till morning.”

Although some fear the technique drives the elephants on to other farms, it is winning converts across Africa. Desperate farmers in Tanzania, Ghana, Gabon, Congo, Botswana, Moz-ambique, Namibia and Swazi-land are all adopting the technique as are Asian countries with elephant problems, including India, where it has been taken up by tea estates in Assam.

Osborn’s trust promises farmers it will purchase any chilli grown in defence of their fields. The best is used to make pepper sauce; the rest goes for the dung bombs.

At the trust’s small office Audrey Siasale comes in with a sack of chilli and a seven-month-old baby on her back. The sack is weighed out at 26lb. She receives £6 and smiles broadly.

“I will use it to buy a school uniform,” she says. “I would have to grow four times as much wheat for the same money.”

Asked if she likes elephants, she shakes her head. “No, I think we should kill them,” she says. “I see tourists taking photos of elephants but I don’t think they are attractive – they kill people and do lots of damage.”

The deep fear of elephants is not unfounded. Scientists say they are attacking humans, each other and other animals more than before. In 2005 guards in South Africa’s Pilanesberg national park shot three young male elephants that had killed 63 rhinos and attacked tourists in safari Jeeps.

Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist at Oregon State University, believes that this “hyper-aggres-sive” behaviour is due to posttraumatic stress syndrome brought on by a combination of habitat loss and culling to control the population.

“It’s a cry for help,” she says. “Their unprecedented behaviour is the result of chronic and traumatic stress. I think it’s evidence of desperation.”

Elephants are highly social animals and studies have shown that a young elephant will stay within 15ft of its mother until it is eight. The male elephants that killed the rhinos all saw their families culled when young. “If the infant elephant experiences trauma such as witnessing the death of the mother, the brain is affected,” says Bradshaw.

At the wildlife office, Mubanga has never heard of posttraumatic stress but is sure of one thing. “If you’re shot in the leg you’ll definitely be annoyed and you won’t forget even when the wound is healed,” he said. “It’s the same with elephants.”

The problem is exacerbated by an increase in elephant numbers. Herds in southern Africa have rebounded since elephants were declared in danger of extinction and a ban on ivory sales was imposed in 1989. Zambia has seen numbers rise from 7,000 to an estimated 30,000.

“The basic management of elephants is out of sync,” Osborn argues. “People believe elephants are near extinction. In fact it’s the other way round – they’re recolonising parts of southern Africa where they haven’t been for 100 years.”

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