Elephantine fear

Where are the elephants? Yaanai engka nikkudu? is a query often raised by the employees of Madupatty tea estate near Munnar before setting o...

Where are the elephants? Yaanai engka nikkudu? is a query often raised by the employees of Madupatty tea estate near Munnar before setting out for work. It8217;s a question that is going to exercise them even more in the days to come.

For on July 14, yet another person was killed here by a wild elephant8212;the second elephant-related death in Madupatty and the fifth in Munnar this year. The victim, a young woman, was viciously trampled right in front of her husband and son who escaped miraculously.

Today, fear stalks the estate and its environs with the killer still at large. It has chased workers and vehicles, damaged parked cars and even gored the hood of a jeep, fortunately unoccupied. On its nocturnal rounds local residents often get a scary close-up of the pachyderm as it fearlessly circles their homes, smashing window panes and ravaging their gardens. And its shrill trumpeting is guaranteed to chill one8217;s spine. Nothing, however, can be more terrifying than running into it on the road.

Understandably, the locals are agitated. They recall that the erstwhile British planters used to have rogue elephants promptly proscribed by the state government and shot dead in the interests of public safety.

However, to do so today is far from easy since the elephant is an endangered species, and any attempt to proscribe one will inevitably get bogged down in red-tapism. Rather than kill the tusker, a Forest Department official has suggested that it be tranquillised and 8216;radio-collared8217; so that its movements could be tracked and people alerted accordingly 8212; a hi-tech innovation no doubt, but one that will unfortunately not benefit the locals since the basic threat to them remains.

In the meantime the residents of Madupatty continue to live in anxiety as the tusker grows bolder. Once afraid only of trucks, now it resolutely confronts these, forcing drivers to backtrack. Others in motorcycles and cars often take deviations to avoid meeting it. And people seldom venture out of their homes after dark without ascertaining the tusker8217;s location.

The elephant has been photographed by many 8212; a full-grown male with long, tapering, needle-like tusks which have earned it the nickname Oosi-kombu yaanai needle-tusked elephant. It has no apparent injuries to explain its misanthropy. However, it appears to be a loner ostracised by the herd, which perhaps accounts for its ill-temper. And, for some inexplicable reason, it prefers to haunt Madupatty and its environs.

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For the locals the situation is becoming intolerable. Many feel the killer should be shot. Elephant conservation, they opine, should not take precedence over human safety, especially when people live in the shadow of death. Perhaps they are right. But a more humane option could be considered: why not tranquillise the tusker and translocate it to the nearby Eravikulam National Park, a human-free zone with a small elephant population?