Human encroachment into forest lands, heartless precautionary measures farmers take to save their crops, poaching and refusal to provide good food, required care and timely medical assistance are fast turning Kerala virtually into a graveyard of wild and captive elephants if statistics available with the Forest Department and elephant-lovers’ outfits are anything to go by.
While an average of 50 wild elephants are dying in the forests of Kerala every year due to totally external factors, at least 16 captive elephants, most of them young, have died in the State this year alone. Another disturbing aspect of the situation is that the authorities are not making any serious efforts to identify the reasons and find the culprits behind these deaths.
Intake of poisoned liquor wash and crops like pineapples, fire-crackers and, of course, poaching are the main reasons behind the deaths of elephants in Kerala forests. Many wild elephants have died in the recent past due to plastic intake. A Forest official in Thrissur said, “They are not dying because of any natural causes. These are actually cases of murder.”
A veterinary surgeon who has performed several post-mortem procedures on elephant carcasses said that a minimum of 400 wild jumbos had died in Kerala in the past eight years. “That is the number of deaths that have come to the Forest Department’s notice. Many of such deaths must be going unnoticed in the deep jungles,” he said.
According to doctors, most of these “accidental” deaths of wild elephants are taking place in forests adjacent to human habitats or in forest areas where land-grabbing by settler farmers has been rampant. An elephant lover says that these jumbo deaths are proof of the “ruthlessness of human beings toward anything that even distantly threatens his private interests.”
Deaths of elephants due to intake of plastics, thrown away by tourists and pilgrims as well as people inhabiting the fringes of forests, have been reported from Sabarimala, Wayanad, Vazhachal and Ponmudi. A minimum of ninety elephants have died due to “external” causes in the past decade in the Pooyamkutty Forest Range alone, Forest officials say.
Doctors associated with the Forest Department admit that the usual practice after the finding of a carcass is to do the post-mortem, bury it hurriedly after taking the necessary notes and forget about it. In most cases, there would be no further procedures and as a result, those indulging in evil practice to avert elephant incursions into farmlands continue with it, they say.
“Using poisoned pineapples is said to be a normal practice among settler farmers living in areas adjacent to forests. Worse is the use of fire-crackers. Once the elephant is injured from a cracker blast, it has to live with that injury for several months if not for several years. Eventually, it will die a terrible death,” says Sunny, a farmer in Anakkulam, Idukki district.
If jumbos in the Kerala forests are thus living in perpetual danger, the situation is not very different as far as captive elephants are concerned. A minimum of 16 captive elephants have died till date this year due to lack of proper care, owners’ refusal to provide timely medical care, exhaustion due to overwork and brutal procedures used for taming.
Most of the elephants which had died this year were young tuskers belonging to the age group of 40-45 years. Elephant lovers and environmentalists say that middlemen who arrange jumbos for temple festivals and mahouts who refuse to ensure the well-being of their wards are often responsible for these premature deaths.
Subjecting elephants to long walks between temples for festivals, forced travel by trucks without proper precautions, lack of food and water in required measures and failure in identifying health problems at the right time are some of the factors that lead to ill health of captive elephants and their early death, according to experts.
