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No More Trunk Calls

A train-hit jumbo sparks off a massive rescue effort. Will it live?

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No More Trunk Calls
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Jumbo Savings?

Recommendations of the elephant task force:

  • 88 elephant corridors to be designated as ecologically sensitive areas
  • Use of uniform signages in all corridors; local communities and railway engine drivers to be sensitised
  • Avoid sharp turns, steep embankments and garbage disposal on tracks
  • Increase funding to save the elephant to Rs 600 crore in the 12th Five-Year Plan

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The elephant-headed god should be angry this year. Days before Indians bow in obeisance to Ganesha on Diwali, a nameless wild tusker lies writhing in pain in a patch of forest near Haldwani in Uttarakhand. Rendered immobile with a broken limb, the 30-year-old lies on its side and wallows in its waste as it waits for the end. #The tusker was hit on the evening of October 21 by a passenger train running between Lalkuan and Bareilly. His perilous condition has now prompted the state authorities to launch an unparalleled rescue mission. The accident comes three years after Arundhati, a popular captive elephant used for rides at the Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand, died due to similar injuries. After falling into a mire, she unsuccessfully battled multiple fractures on one of her legs for four weeks as wildlife authorities struggled to treat her and ruminated sheepishly over a mercy killing.

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In the latest case, the tusker, after being hit, managed to drag himself into the nearby forest with help from two other elephants of the same herd. As forest officials watched “with great admiration”, they pulled up the injured pachyderm with their trunks. Officials used darts the next day to administer painkillers after the elephant was seen limping. Defying odds, he moved deeper into the Tanda forest range along with the herd. On October 24, the elephant was noticed 10 kilometres away from the accident spot and a rescue team, comprising doctors and postgraduate veterinary students, was sent there the day after. Painkiller and antibiotics were administered again from a distance and food—bananas, jaggery and sugarcane—left near it.

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“Despite the injury, the elephant and his companions would not let us approach him and that prevented a closer inspection,” says D.K. Pandey, range officer for the Tanda forest. His condition deteriorated further the next day as he continuously refused to eat and drink. Finally, on October 27, the elephant was tranquillised and an examination conducted that revealed his left hind leg had a fractured femur bone. “There is now a risk of a compound fracture if the broken bone ruptures the skin. It will then be more difficult to manage,” says Arup Kumar Das, associate professor of veterinary surgery at the G.B Pant University of Agriculture and Technology. His colleague J.L. Singh adds that there is also the risk of poor blood circulation and respiratory failure. “Because he is lying constantly on one side, the animal’s heavy weight obstructs blood flow and the normal functioning of the lung underneath.” 

The authorities, to be fair, have gone to great lengths to save the elephant— from driving a mobile X-ray machine and a generator deep into the forest to allow them to work at nights to commandeering an earth mover to help the pachyderm stand. Medicines—vast supplies of antibiotics, herbal disinfectant sprays, ayurvedic balms, painkillers and lifesaving fluids—have been brought in and special needles purchased after extensive searches in nearby towns. Elephant experts from Assam and Kerala are being consulted and no one is calculating the costs yet. “We have already spent Rs 40,000 just on medicines and this is what I have to get today,” says forest ranger Pandey brandishing a long list. “We’ll spend whatever it takes to save this elephant. This Diwali, this’ll be our way of worshipping Ganesha.”

Since October 28, veterinary doctors and post-graduate students from the nearby university have been working round-the-clock, setting up drips which sends litres of vital fluids and medicines into the tusker’s veins. In a sense, it’s a hands-on experience like no other for the university’s veterinary students; they’ll be talking about this years from now. Taking care of farm animals is one thing, treating a wild elephant in the middle of a forest quite another. Nothing they have done so far has prepared them for this, battling the fear of the tusker’s friends returning, ducking the mud flung by his trunk and seeing insects like they never knew existed. “Until now, we had never worked on an animal in the wild. It has been a very good learning experience,” says student Anuradha Gupta. Of course, here too curious onlookers have trickled in. People, some of whom have never seen an elephant in the wild before, come in steadily through the day. Others pose for pictures next to him as the once-majestic tusker reacts to the transgressions with helpless gestures. The doctors are now hoping against hope for the injury to heal naturally as there is little else that can be done. He is losing weight and body fluids constantly. 

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Anil Baluni, advisor to the Uttarakhand CM on forests and environment, doesn’t deny the possibility of the tusker being put to sleep. “It’s obviously in pain. If things do not improve soon, we will have to think of it. We are not talking about it now because we don’t want the morale of the nursing staff to fall,” he says. As always, after all the bad press, the state is now looking at identifying elephant crossing spots and working with the railways to reduce train speeds at these junctions. “We will work on training train drivers, mark spots frequented by elephants with radium signs and get forest guards to monitor their movements,” says Parag Madhukar Dhakate, the divisional forest officer.  

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As for the big picture, things may look up with the creation of the National Elephant Conservation Authority, something recommended recently in the report of the government task force on elephants. This should go some way in better managing conservation efforts of what is now also our national heritage animal. A.N. Prasad, director of Project Elephant, says “we are constantly dialoguing with the Railways and our efforts have brought down the number of deaths... they were more frequent earlier.” Sheila Rao, honorary secretary of cupa, an animal welfare group that was consulted for the report, says, “There is a serious dearth of veterinarians who are trained to work on wild animals and an incident like this highlights this. You can’t have them working on a cow one day and a tiger the other.” Anybody who’s seen an elephant near death will agree that these giant animals deserve a much better deal.

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