THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In an unprecedented move, the Forest Department has decided to re-investigate the deaths of 90-odd wild elephants in the state in the last two years, nearly all of which were till now officially attributed to natural causes.
The Department had all along denied the role of poaching or any other man-made causes like the use of crude bombs behind the deaths in the wild.
“This is only an attempt to rule out any other possibility. We just want to be doubly sure,” a top Forest Department official said.
The decision to re-open the jumbo deaths has come in the wake of recent revelations that elephant poaching is rampant in the wilds of the state. In most of the cases, the carcasses would have fully disintegrated. Exhumation, therefore, has been ruled out.
Instead, forest officials will conduct a ground-truthing of sorts. They will visit the areas where the wild elephant was found dead, talk to the locals and forest watchers who had found first noticed the carcass, and also re-examine the ‘mahassar’ prepared at the time of spotting the carcass.
The report will be vetted by a senior forest official at the level of a conservator of forests. It is officially stated that there have been 92 wild elephant deaths in 2014.
“Most of these carcasses were found drifting in the rivers along forest edges, and most had explosive-inflicted wounds on them,” Venkitachalam said.
The post-mortem of these rotten carcasses had invariably thrown up one conclusion: death by natural causes. The Department has now decided to look at two more possibilities: poaching for tusks and silent vendetta killing.
It is said that if elephants are not killed for their tusks, then they are done away with to prevent them from encroaching into plantation, agricultural lands or tourism properties along the fringes of the forests.
Venkitachalam said that the re-investigation would serve no purposes as the Deparetment had not sent the viscera of dead elephants to Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, as has been mandated by the Centre.
