Elephants

The day Terry Pratchett died, in 2015, my nine-year-old made a model of a bearded man in a big hat holding hands with Death. Few people have written as much about death as Pratchett. No one else has written about death in a way that would make a nine-year-old want to play with him. The Death who stalks Pratchett’s Discworld is a lonely, bewildered figure, unable to understand why he’s possibly not the ideal person to adopt a little girl, or why people are unsettled by the idea of him dressing up as Santa. But Death always…

The interactions between a human and an animal are quite common around the forest areas of the country. There are quite a few national parks and reverses in India that is a safe havens for animals. These parks are located near human settlements and that is why many roads cross through them. While we have seen numerous occasions of animal and human conflict on video, here is another one where a group of elephants stop a truck to treat on sugarcanes. The video shows a mother and baby elephant filling up their bellies…

An exciting new study from an international team of scientists has shed some light on exactly why elephants, one of the biggest animals on the planet, paradoxically experience unusually low rates of cancer. The research found these remarkable mammals carry unique genetic variants that reduce their risk of tumors, and the findings could help develop new cancer therapies for humans.As an organism grows older, and its cells continue to replicate, the chances of cancerous mutations increase. And the bigger the organism, the…

A recent finding at a beach in southern Spain suggests that the region may have been a nursery for an extinct species of elephant thousands of years ago. Fossilised footprints of ancient straight-tusked elephants have been found in the coastal site of Huelva, a region that the scientists call the Matalascanas Trampled Surface. Footprints and trackways have been attributed to the newborns, calves, and juveniles of the straight-tusked elephant species. Previous studies suggest that the tracks were laid down about 1,06,000…

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have invented a soft, jelly-like material that can endure the equivalent of an elephant standing on it and not explode like a water balloon — even though it's 80 percent water. When the weight is removed, the material returns to its former shape completely without being permanently deformed. The material, described as “super jelly”, is as strong as a shatterproof glass. It could be employed in a variety of applications, including soft robotics, bioelectronics, and biological…

In the past, we have covered several videos in which the wild animals attacked the vehicles. Some wildlife reserves even took an action against it. Here, we have another such incident in which we can see a couple of elephants attacking a Honda Amaze. Totally unacceptable and barbaric behaviour by some idiotic onlookers.Just because Elephants are gentle,they are being magnanimous to these uncouth minions otherwise it does not take much for these gentle giants to show their power.Video-shared.Believed to be in Hasanur…

Do you remember that heartbreaking piece of news about a pregnant elephant in Kerala who died in June 2020 because she mistakenly ate a pineapple stuffed with firecrackers? The explosives in the fruit were planted by local farmers to protect their crops from wild boars. The wrong animal took the bait. The badly injured elephant died, standing in water, trying to cool herself after the unexpected explosion. She was given an honourable farewell by forest officials on the land where she grew up. Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan,…

Since 1977, Happy the elephant has lived in a one-acre exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. But a New York state court ruling has halted a year-long legal effort to address the elephant in the room – whether Happy is, well, happy.  In a 5-2 decision, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit filed on behalf of the 51-year-old elephant from the Nonhuman Rights Project, an animal rights advocacy group, to get her re-homed to an elephant sanctuary.Happy is "a nonhuman animal who is not a 'person' subjected to illegal…

In September 2018, near the Indian city of Tumkur, villagers recorded a beleaguered Asian elephant trying to nudge the limp body of her dead calf back to life. As her ears fluttered in distress, she used her trunk and feet to jostle the lifeless carcass for more than 24 hours. Eventually, 12 more adults gathered around the deceased calf, as if to comfort the mother. Such seeming displays of mourning are extremely difficult to spot—much less study—in the dense jungles of southern…

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh discusses how contemporary literary fiction has failed to address climate change: “When I try to think of writers whose imaginative work has communicated a more specific sense of the accelerating changes in our environment, I find myself at a loss; of literary novelists writing in English only a handful of names come to mind… The literary mainstream, even as it has become more engagé on many fronts, remains just as unaware of the crisis on our…