Hot Stuff Coming Through!

Hankering for heat? Savoring something spicy? Then test your mettle with a hot sauce that can hold its own against elephants. And for an added ingredient, when you purchase Elephant Pepper chili products, made from peppers grown by African farmers, you’ll also be buying elephants a little more time to roam.

Supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Elephant Pepper Development Trust (EPDT) has unleashed the power of the hot pepper both to resolve human-elephant conflicts and to raise money for farmers and conservation in Africa. Because chili peppers are distasteful to elephants and other crop-raiding mammals, farmers plant them as buffers around their maize, sorghum, and millet fields. The chili effectively wards off the elephants without harm, requires little expense, and introduces a viable cash crop to the economies of African nations.

The idea for Elephant Pepper was hatched in 1997 in the Zambezi Valley, which straddles the borders of Zimbabwe and Zambia. There, researcher Loki Osborn—now project director for the EPDT—observed increasing confrontations between farmers and the wildlife sharing their lands. Crop-raiding elephants can destroy entire fields overnight, and farmers often reacted by shooting them. Electric fences are expensive and time-consuming to maintain. Chilies, he discovered, offer a much more reasonable alternative to deter elephant trespassing.

“Chili peppers give farmers an economically feasible means of keeping elephants away from valuable crops through non-lethal methods,” Osborn says. “The Trust then gives these farmers a fair price for these chili peppers, which are then used to make great hot sauce products, all of which are now available in the United States.” Previously, the chili products were available only in South Africa, Zambia, and Botswana.

Through www.elephantpepper.com, you can now test the spicy solution for yourself. Choose from two hot sauce products, Zambezi Red and Baobab Gold, or try a chili jam or relish.

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