No wonder the elephant is a part of the Hindu religious practices in all temples, and so highly regarded and respected! ............................................................................................... Bharathan is...a tuskless male elephant...around Thorapally, a small village along the Mysore-Ooty highway, right at the edge of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu. He is enormous and intimidating, but he’s also known for his smarts, and is quickly learning to coexist with the people he comes in contact with. He comes out of the reserve every night to try and get food from near the village. He hides quietly in the bushes waiting for the jackfruit-seller to take a pee-break before raiding his stock, and tolerates a large number of tourists in close proximity — one even pulled his tail to try to get some ‘action’ out of him. When the forest department dug an ‘elephant-proof trench’ to keep him inside the reserve, he took to using the highway — scaring away the guard and carefully stepping around the check post. When the locals gathered to try and prevent him from getting across the check post, he went as far as to enlist the help of another elephant! While the friend acted as a decoy to divert attention, he quietly made his way up to the elephant chasers, trumpeted loudly to scare them off, and then quickly got across. ...Bharathan seems to have learnt that violence and direct confrontation with people does not work in the long term. He is continuously trying to outsmart them — using his brain rather than brawn — despite having infinitely more brawn than his human adversaries. A ‘rogue’ tusker in central India recently knocked down a house, but when it heard a baby crying it stopped its rampage, and carefully cleared the debris around the baby. A domestic elephant that was working to plant timber posts into holes that had been dug into the ground refused to put the post into one of the holes, despite its mahout’s goading. When the mahout looked, he found a dog sleeping in the hole, and the elephant clearly did not want to kill it. When elephants accidentally kill people, they invariably stand over them and try to cover them with leaves or mud, and are visibly distressed at what they have done. They are also the only other species known to have rituals around death, where the herd gathers around a deceased animal, covers it with leaves and guards it against predators. (Extracted from an article -- A MUST READ FOR THOSE WHO ARE FASCINATED with the role of human beings as a part of the overall biosphere).
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 07:18:00 +0000
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