Human–elephant conflict is a result of habitat loss and fragmentation in forest borders. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are broadly used to real measure for generation of an early warning against elephant intrusion. The present work proposes a Wireless Integrated Sensor Network (WISN) based boundary intellect system for accurate detection of Elephants. Moreover, the proposed system combines the utilization of three sensors, namely, acoustic sensor, vibration sensor and camera. Acoustic and vibration sensors are enable elephant detection even when they have out of sight while visual identification enabled by camera. The integration of these three sensors along with the cognition theory and Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) increases the novelty of the proposed work. The decision making section is enhanced by FCM and Fuzzy If-Then rules for setting the priority based on performance evaluation. ‘Theory of mind’ is the most appropriate theory for Elephant cognition and inferences various information about elephant depending on the sensors. Acoustic monitoring provides inference on elephant's behaviour, visual monitoring provides inference on elephant's motion patterns and vibration monitoring on age and gender classification of elephants. Overall the proposed system has highlights the efficiency in the detection of the presence of the elephant based on the integration of three sensors with the respective ranking scores. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.