Rampage

Elephants hold extremely fond memories for me throughout my childhood. I remember as a young child going to the Adelaide zoo, and hand feeding the beautiful elephant that they had there, whilst watching it give rides to other young children. That elephant is no longer at the zoo as they decided that its enclosure was too small for such a huge animal. I was extremely sorry to see it go, but then I thought to myself, how cruel it had probably been for that elephant to be kept in a relatively small enclosure with no room to move. I never even questioned as a child why she constantly took one step forward and then one step backwards. It was because she lacked adequate room to move.

Elephants kill people on a constant basis. In no way do the majority of these majestic animals mean to hurt anyone. It is their natural instinct to run when in danger, and an animal as huge as an elephant can cause a lot of damage in the process. The majority of the people killed are not done so due to malicious intent on the part of the animal. Elephant rampages occur due to the animals being scared, trapped away from their herd, or sometimes for no reason at all. Elephants will attack however, if provoked or even simply approached by someone wanting to take photos. They are territorial beings and do not take kindly to someone moving in on their territory.

There was one extremely strange report of an elephant killing a man in India late last year. The story goes that a man clambered up a tree when he saw the approach of a herd of rampaging elephants heading for his village. One particular elephant stopped and shook the tree where the man was taking shelter. The man fell to the ground breaking both of his legs. The report goes on to tell of how people tried to rescue the man from the elephant to no avail. Upon seeing all of the people and noise about it seems the elephant got frightened and proceeded to trample the man to death. This is where the weird part comes into the story. The elephant then picked the man up in its trunk and continued to carry the dead body around for two weeks, even bathing with the body. According to the reports this behaviour has absolutely baffled experts in the field, and all claim that they have never heard of behaviour like this from an elephant before. What can we possibly derive from these actions, some say the elephant must have felt some kind of guilt for killing the man, and that was his way of showing he was sorry. I'm not sure what to make of the story, however, if it was remorse that this animal was exhibiting, maybe we could learn a lesson or two from this tragedy.

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