Wild Cries

  VILLAINS ON WHEELS - DEATH KNELL FOR WILDLIFE? A pair of elephants on a railway track Argument Setting Local people and the forest officials were a hapless witness to yet another poignant scene of gruesome killing of a group of three wild elephants comprising of an adult female, a makhna (tusk less male) and a sub-adult by a locomotive on the 26 th November 2021 night at Mahendramedu near Navakkarai in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu. This soon turned into national news. Postmortem report showed that the female was several months pregnant. This meant that the actual casualty was four. This time, the Mangaluru- Chennai express train ran over the pachyderms in the Walayar-Madukkarai section passing through Kerala-Tamil Nadu border, a well-known theatre of rail-elephant conflict, where 14 elephant kills were recorded on the tracks in the past decade. Elephant run over occurs at regular intervals here and is signaling a virtual death knell for wildlife, chiefly pachyderms. N...

                          ' When you look at elephant herds that are non-stressed, the males are never around’ -    Mark Shand, British travel writer and conservationist Asian Elephant- An epitome of charisma Of the elephants, Mahatma Gandhi once remarked ‘The elephant  needs a thousand times more food than the ant but that is not an indication of inequality’ . My understanding is that he probably wanted to reinforce the thought that Nature has placed every organism in its rightful position; so the obvious differences between a gigantic elephant and a tiny ant can’t be seen as an indicator of inequality, which men seem to have been perpetrating within humanity. True to this visionary statement, elephant remains Nature’s great masterpiece ever. Doesn’t it reflect the greatness of an animal species that has 45 name equivalents described in a poetical lexicon ( Tamil nighandu) ? It is none other tha...