Enraged elephant defies nature, turns man-eater

NEW DELHI: In an unheard of incident, a wild elephant killed and devoured a man who came in the way of the herd in the Garo hills of Meghalaya. 

Elephants are herbivores. Though they’ve been known to  go on the rampage, trampling or battering humans to death or destroying hutments and crops, there are no records of a pachyderm feeding on a human being.

Confirming the incident which took place nearly a month ago, principal chief conservator of forests of Meghalaya VK Nautiyal, who was in New Delhi for a conference of top forest officials in the country recently, said it was not normal for an elephant to eat a man. Nautiyal added it is unlikely the animal will develop a taste for blood or turn into a carnivore.

However, this puts the spotlight on the man-elephant conflict, especially in a state that is three-fourths forest.

Contact with humans has had another adverse effect with the beast picking up some of the vices of men. There have instances of elephants coming into villages looking for locally brewed wine, getting drunk, and going on a rampage, with fatal consequences for themselves at times.

In the last few months, 10 elephants have been electrocuted in the Garo Hills and Ri Bhoi districts of the state when they came in contact with high-voltage electric poles after consuming the local brew.

An indicator of the volatile situation is the fact that it is wild elephants and not militants that are giving state election department and forest officials sleepless nights ahead of the March 3 elections.

“Wild elephants can pose a threat to voters and poll officials in certain areas during the elections with herds coming down from the hills in search of food and local brew,” said a forest official.

The state has identified several polling stations, most of them in the Garo Hills and in close proximity to the Indo-Bangladesh border as “elephant-sensitive”.

Speaking about the problem in New Delhi, Nautiyal said the forest department had to provide protection to polling centres in the interiors of the state and they had even sought the centre’s assistance to compensate victims of wild elephants.
 
The forest department also plans to deploy trained elephants who, along with their trainers or ‘mahouts’, form mounted patrols to chase away marauding wild tuskers.