India, Aug. 14 -- Kerala is looking at an increasingly dramatic response to an increasingly difficult problem: what to do with wild animals that repeatedly enter human settlements.

The state, squeezed between a dense human population and the forests of the southern Western Ghats, is considering a combination of carrying-capacity studies, habitat restoration, stronger rapid-response systems, translocation of conflict animals and, in exceptional circumstances, even airlifting them.

The idea sounds technologically impressive. But wildlife experts say the harder question is not how to move an elephant or a tiger. It is whether moving the animal addresses the reason it entered a human landscape in the first place.

Kerala's forests are not i...