GUWAHATI: Six Asiatic wild elephants were electrocuted as they went berserk after drinking rice beer in India’s remote northeast, a wildlife official said.
Nearly 40 elephants came to a village on Friday looking for food. Some of them found beer, which farmers ferment and keep in plastic and tin drums in their huts, said Sunil Kumar, a state wildlife official.
They got drunk, uprooted an electric pole and were electrocuted in Chandan Nukat, a village nearly 240 kilometres west of Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya state, Kumar said.
“There would have been more casualties had the villagers not chased them away,” said Dipu Mark, a local conservationist.
The elephants are known to have a taste for rice beer brewed by tribal communities in India’s northeast.
Four wild elephants died in similar circumstances in the region three years ago.
Also last week, five rare Asiatic lions were found electrocuted on the edge of western India’s Gir National Park. Authorities said the lions were killed by an electrified fence that a villager had put up illegally to protect crops near the sanctuary.India’s northeast accounts for the world’s largest concentration of wild Asiatic elephants with the states of Assam and Meghalaya alone estimated to have 7,000 of them.
“It’s great to have such a huge number of elephants, but the increasing man-elephant conflict following the shrinkage in their habitat due to the growing human population is giving us nightmares,” said Pradyut Bordoloi, former Assam Forest and Environment Minister.
In Assam state, wild elephants have killed more than 600 people in the past 16 years.
Satellite imagery by the National Remote Sensing Agency, a federal agency, shows that as much as 280,000 hectares of thick forests in Assam have been cleared off by human encroacher between 1996 and 2000.
The villagers have been retaliating by poisoning the elephants to death.—APBy Wasbir Hussain
