This from the weekend edition of NYT. Just read the first page to get the main idea.
New York Times Article about Killer Elephants
A couple of quotes:
quote:
All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia... elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem."
quote:
African elephants use their long tusks to forage through dense jungle brush. They’ve also been known to wield them, however, with the ceremonious flash and precision of gladiators, pinning down a victim with one knee in order to deliver the decisive thrust. Okello told me that a young Indian tourist was killed in this fashion two years ago...
Yes, I did realize that elephants are dangerous and agressive creatures in the wild before reading this. But I didn't know that they actually "razed" villages, or pinned people down to deliver a "coup de grace".
And then there was this:
quote:
Since the early 1990’s... young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior... has been reported in “a number of reserves” in the region.
Just as a side note, I wanted to say that I think elephants are fascinating creatures that deserve our concern (and protection in many cases). I just wanted to point out that the violent behavior of elephants simulated in Dwarf Fortress is not at all exaggerated. Possibly the opposite is true!
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Topic: H.E.C. (Human-Elephant Conflict) in the NYT (Read 1132 times)