NEW DELHI: Not just life’s pressures, social stress and even a sort of road rage is afflicting wild elephants in India. And this is a direct consequence of growing human presence, climate change and dwindling habitat and food and water that is increasingly bringing them up against humans.
Nearly 300 persons are killed every year by wild elephants in India. The figure was as low as 200 till year 1999-2000 - an indicator of the growing human-elephant conflict.
Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful co-existence, there is now hostility and violence. It was usually attributed to high testosterone levels in male elephants in ‘musth’ during mating season or to the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. In ‘Elephant Breakdown,’ an essay in the journal ‘Nature’, Gay Bradshaw and her colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of killings and habitat loss, they claim, have disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations in the herds and affected the milieu in which young elephants have been raised in the wild.
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