Speeding Train Plows Into Elephants in India, Killing 5 Animals

NEW DELHI — The night train to Silchar was moving fast — too fast, the authorities say.

As it chugged into a forested area of northeastern India on Saturday night, a group of villagers waved their flashlights frantically, urging the driver to slow down. He didn’t know why, but he soon found out.

Ahead in the darkness, a large herd of elephants was ambling across the railway tracks. When the train driver finally saw what was in front of him, he hit the emergency brake, railway officials said, but it was too late.

The 14-car passenger train plowed right into the herd. Two calves and two adult elephants were killed instantly, and an adult elephant that was badly injured died on Monday. Some local news reports said that several baby elephants had not even moved as the train approached, and that adult elephants had sought to protect them by surrounding them.

Indian forestry officials said the warnings had been ignored for a simple reason: The train was running 10 minutes late.

“The driver was trying to cover up the time,” said P. Sivakumar, a senior forestry officer in northern Assam, the state where the accident happened. The incident is now under investigation.

In some parts of India, especially in the northeast, it is quite common for elephants to pass through populated regions or to step across railway tracks — or even four-lane highways — in search of food. 

Many areas have been designated elephant corridors, where drivers are supposed to proceed with caution.

In the case over the weekend, the train operator was traveling above the speed limit of 30 kilometers, or about 20 miles, an hour, forestry officials said. Earlier in the day, the Forestry Department had sent several urgent notifications to railway operators that a large elephant herd was moving through the Habaipur area, about 250 kilometers north of Silchar, near India’s border with Bangladesh. The area is deep green on most maps, and a well-known refuge for elephants.

This episode is the latest in an unfortunate pattern. As recently as December, a train in Assam killed five adult elephants, including one that was pregnant.

But in India’s wildlife community, the latest accident seems to have reverberated more, adding to the sadness and outrage that has been building.

“The railways need to be held accountable,’’ said Prerna Singh Bindra, a conservationist and writer. 

“How come we have not learned our lessons?”

About two weeks ago, Ms. Bindra and more than a dozen other wildlife advocates sent a letter to India’s railway minister pointing out this very problem.

“Our elephants are in trouble,’’ the letter began.

It then laid out several steps to help prevent train-elephant accidents, including building underpasses beneath railway lines for the animals, and telling passengers not to throw food out of the windows, as that encourages hungry animals to linger along the tracks.

Wildlife experts say that India has the largest number of train accidents involving elephants in the world, with hundreds killed in the past 20 years. Many accidents tend to involve one or two animals, though in late 2013, five elephants were killed by a train in the Indian state of West Bengal, another area where such collisions happen frequently.

Sadly for the elephants, the number of collisions with trains seems to be rising. For example, in West Bengal, there were 27 such deaths from 1974 to 2002. But from 2004 to 2015, a much shorter period, there were 65, and there were as many as 30 killed in the last five years alone, according to Indian environmentalists.

Train accidents are just one of the many threats elephants in India face. Some of the animals have been poached for their ivory, others poisoned by farmers angry at them for eating their crops. At the same time, forests are being cleared for timber and farms, and more train tracks and highways are being built all around the country. The wide open wild spaces where elephants used to roam are fragmenting as India’s human population, now 1.3 billion, grows.

Asian elephants are considered endangered, with at most around 50,000 left. A recent study showed a dip in India’s elephant population, though scientists disagreed over whether this was because of a change in how the elephants were counted or if there were actually fewer elephants.

“We revere the elephant as a god, as Ganesha,” Ms. Bindra said, referring to one of Hinduism’s most popular deities. “Yet at the same time, we are in a situation where we have elephants dying and being chased off areas with human habitation.’’

Perhaps, then, it is a cruel paradox that the mascot of Indian Railways is an elephant.

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Elephant dung shows stress levels

Asian elephant stress levels peak during dry seasons, when resources are low. This is what studying leftover hormones in elephant poop unravels. The method could be an important non-invasive tool to study the health of wild pachyderm populations in India, finds a new study. In the future, it could also help test the efficacy of management interventions introduced to conserve the endangered species.

With shrinking habitats, India’s endangered elephants face food shortages and increased disturbances in their environments. The resulting physiological stress (a result of secretion of stress hormones such as glucocorticoids) can be beneficial for elephants, helping them escape from threats. However, if prolonged, the stress can affect their health, reproduction and even survival. Stress levels are often high in emaciated pachyderms: so can hormones – traces of which come through in elephant dung – be an indicator of elephant health?

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, examined changes in visual body condition scores of 261 elephants in the Mysuru and Nilgiri elephant reserves in south India during wet and dry seasons, scoring their ‘body condition’ on a scale of one (for very thin pachyderms) to five based on the visibility of bones. They also analysed faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (fGCM) levels in the fresh dung of the elephants they observed, to see if stress hormones were a good indicator of body condition across seasons. To study annual patterns, they repeated this for nine female elephants across seven years.

The findings, published in Conservation Physiology, show that the body condition of elephants deteriorated during dry seasons, and has a strong relationship with fGCM levels (especially in females). As body condition deteriorated, stress hormone levels spiked.

“Many conservation studies focuses on how animals behave when they are disturbed, how their population declines or changes. But they forget to address how such changes affect the internal health of an animal. Measuring fGCM will tell us how elephants are affected by either intrinsic or extrinsic factors. Our study is the first to examine this in free-ranging Asian elephants,” says doctoral researcher Sanjeeta Sharma Pokharel, lead author of the study.

“The sudden change in the profile of fGCM after any management intervention would definitely indicate the strong association between stress response and management practices,” she says.

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