The 70-year-old woman, Maya Murmu, was attacked by the wild elephant as she walked to collect water in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district, Indian news outlet The Print reported.
After the elephant attacked Murmu, she was rushed to hospital, but she succumbed to her injuries, Lopamudra Nayak, an inspector at the Rasgovindpur police station, told The Print.
Duncan McNair, a lawyer and founder of conservation charity Save The Asian Elephants, told Newsweek that this incident is a reminder that although gentle creatures, elephants can be “dangerous and deadly.”
However, McNair said these incidents rarely happen without the elephant having been provoked in someway. “These endangered elephants can be deadly dangerous, particularly when provoked or abused,” he said.
“Elephants are generally benign, and passive … they don’t rush out of nowhere to attack people that pose no threat to their safety, or babies or to anything like that,” he said. “[This incident] is surprising because it shows no provocation of the elephant…”
“It’s just possible that if [the elephant] was in proximity still at the time of the funeral, and that’s not clear, that it will have recognised the remains. And it may have seen or smelled that and it may have associated that woman with some catastrophe to it or it’s herd. That is quite possible,” he said.
Human and elephant conflict is on the rise across the world because the loss of the animals’ natural habitat is forcing elephants into closer proximity with residential areas.
Climate change is also making life harder for elephants. As the temperature increases, water sources are more likely to dry up, causing elephants to hunt out new resources, and this can cause them to come into contact with humans. Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district has suffered severe droughts in recent years.
The herd of 11 elephants strayed into the field near a village in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district during the night. The man who was attacked had been guarding the field, The Hindu Times reported.
According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), these kinds of instances can cause elephants to be seen as a nuisance. In one 2001 case, 60 elephants were found dead—poisoned by farmers—across parts of India and Sumatra.
The sanctuary, which operates as a safari park, is “very much favored” by Asian elephants because of the abundance of water within it, “even during summer,” according to the Forest Department.
source: Newsweek
