Officials said search teams, aided by drones, are combing dense forest tracts, including a national reserve in neighbouring Odisha state.<\/p>\n
Fear has driven residents of more than 20 villages to abandon their farms or barricade themselves indoors at night, elected village head Pratap Chachar told AFP.<\/p>\n
\u201cA police team, or forest official vehicle, visits in the night to provide essential help to villagers,\u201d Chachar said.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of thousands of Indians are affected each year by crop-raiding elephants.<\/p>\n
Asian elephants are now restricted to just 15% of their original habitat.<\/p>\n
The usually shy animals are coming into increasing contact with humans because of rapidly expanding settlements and growing forest disturbance, including mining operations.<\/p>\n
As elephant habitats shrink, conflict between humans and wild elephants has grown – 629 people were killed by elephants across India in 2023-2024, according to parliamentary figures.<\/p>\n
The elephants that pose the most danger to humans are often rogue bulls, solitary male animals enraged during \u201cmusth\u201d, a period of heightened sexual activity when testosterone levels soar.<\/p>\n
A former forest official said the elephant was likely in musth, and may now have calmed down and rejoined its herd.<\/p>\n
India is home to the majority of the world\u2019s remaining wild Asian elephants, a species listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and increasingly threatened by shrinking habitat.<\/p>\n
The Wildlife Institute of India last year issued a new estimate, that put the country\u2019s wild elephant population at 22,446, a report that also warned of the deepening pressures on one of India\u2019s most iconic animals.<\/p>\n
-Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Officials said search teams, aided by drones, are combing dense forest tracts, including a national reserve in neighbouring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[23968,2327,95,15382,5732,16731,32655,92479,2344,5501,10933,6793,128333,3375,11156,5840,111,139,69,23421,10711,2682,384,137579,3048,147,1361,137580,15391,406],"class_list":["post-231503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-23968","tag-2327","tag-and","tag-blamed","tag-elephant","tag-forests","tag-hunting","tag-hunts","tag-india","tag-indian","tag-injured","tag-injuring","tag-jharkhand","tag-killed","tag-killing","tag-least","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-officers","tag-officials","tag-others","tag-people","tag-rampaging","tag-said","tag-science","tag-that","tag-villagers","tag-wild","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}