Jalpaiguri: Dead calf that mother elephant carried for 7 km retrieved, sent for autopsy

A video shot by the staff of the tea garden widely circulated on social media shows that the calf died on Friday in the Dooars Chunabhati tea garden. The mother elephant carried the carcass with her trunk and moved from one tea garden to another. She ultimately joined the herd the same afternoon.

Gorumara Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) Anshu Yadav said, “It was a heart-wrenching sight. We found the carcass in a decomposed condition today. We cannot confirm whether the calf was stillborn till the reports arrive. Once we were informed about the mother elephant carrying the dead calf, I asked the staff to monitor her movement with the help of drones. She was moving with the carcass in an abandoned tea garden.”

The herd of about 25-30 elephants is now in the Diana forests, officials said.

The carcass couldn’t be recovered earlier since the herd of elephants was accompanying it. “The carcass could be lifted only after the wild elephants left it behind and moved ahead,” said a forest official.

According to experts, the elephants’ response to the death of a family member is like that of humans.

Sanjeeta Sharma Pokharel, a conservation biologist from the Indian Institute of Science Centre for Ecological Sciences, observed an instance of an elephant responding to other’s death in her 4 years of fieldwork in India. Even researchers having spent decades studying Asian elephants in the bush had seen these “thanatological behaviors” only a handful of times, she said.

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Pokharel added, “At this stage we do not know why the mother elephant was carrying a dead calf. Science requires data and evidence. Clearly, the mother elephant is grieving. There has been little research on Asian elephants. In my research case, the herd was not even leaving the autopsy site. They were roaming nearby. It is clear that there is some kind of emotional link between elephants and their relatives when they die.”

Aritra Kshettry, an independent researcher who worked on elephant-human relationships in North Bengal for eight years, said, “Monkeys and elephants are among those few animals that are similar to humans when it comes to mourning their dead.”

As per the last census in 2017, elephant population is close to 500 in north Bengal and 250 in the state’s south, said Kshettry. “The elephant population gradually picked up after the Wildlife Century Act was enacted in 1972,” he further said.