A mother elephant toured tea fields and peripheral areas of Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district, carrying the remains of her child in her trunk. The mother was seen straining to remove her dead calf with her trunk in Ambari Tea Estate, Jalpaiguri, in a video that has gone viral on social media.
The mother elephant seemed irritated in the video. She struggled at first to lift her dead calf. However, the mother tusker subsequently strolled away with the calf’s carcass and vanished into the tea gardens.
The calf died on Friday morning in the Dooars region’s Chunabhati tea garden in Banarhat district, according to forest officials. With a herd of roughly 30-35 elephants, the mother elephant scooped up the calf’s body with her trunk and wandered from one tea garden to the next.
The elephant herd had travelled nearly 7 kilometres, according to officers. The elephants travelled from Chunabhati via Ambari, Diana, and Newdooars tea gardens before burying the calf’s remains behind a shrub at Redbank tea estate.
Several teams from the state forest department arrived on the scene, but they were unable to remove the body or guide the distraught mother elephant back to the forest until Friday evening. The reason of death has yet to be determined, but forest staff are now stationed in the vicinity, keeping a careful eye on the situation, according to officials.
Meanwhile, the World Wildlife Fund reports that Northern Bengal is an essential home for roughly 400 resident elephants. This region accounts for more than a quarter of all elephant-related deaths in the country.
Elephants, on the other hand, are extremely sensitive animals capable of complex emotions, according to Newsweek. According to a research, Asian elephants, in particular, have showed empathy for other suffering animals and have even been seen to actively assist dying calves.
