Malaysia’s elephants stay more outside protected areas than in

in 1999, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a doyen of research into African , made an intriguing . Using the Global Positioning System () 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.At first sight, it looks as though Asian elephants did not get the memo. They seem to travel outside protected areas with gay abandon. But a study by Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, in Yunnan province, China, and Benoit Goossens of Danau Girang Field Centre, in Sabah, Malaysia, suggests that this abandon is not quite as gay as it seems.