Bhopal: Deeply anguished over the death of its companion due to electrocution, an elephant, named Bharat, refused to move from the mishap site, leading the forest officials to launch a rescue operation involving a team of tuskers.
Bharat was finally captured and sent to Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve on Tuesday after a 48-hour-long rescue operation.
The 14-year-old tusker, fitted with a radio collar, had been spotted moving around Bartollha under Malakpur in Madhya Pradesh’s Rewa district, for the last four days, refusing to budge an inch, a senior forest officer said.
Its long-time tusker companion died at the site when it stepped on a live wire on Saturday.
Four pachyderms, two each from Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve and Sanjay Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, were deployed in the operation to capture it.
The elephant was finally rescued and captured on Tuesday after a 48-hour-long operation on Tuesday, a forest officer said.
“The elephant was rescued and taken to the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve”, Rewa divisional forest officer (DFO) Lokesh Nirpura told this newspaper.
According to the DFO, the two elephants had a strong bonding between them and used to move together in the forests for the past seven months.
“The slain elephant was very calm and composed and has no record of harming any person or damaging properties, whereas Bharat is naughty. Many times, the slain elephant was seen pacifying Bharat dissuading it from making any mischief when they were moving together”, Mr. Nirpura recounted.
Their friendship, in fact, had become a talk of local forest dwellers and forest officials.
Bharat was so upset after the death of its companion that it spent the whole night of Saturday with the body and was seen moving it to wake it up without realizing that it was already dead.
The forest officials removed the body from the site to take it for postmortem on Sunday when Bharat moved away from the site for a brief period, the forest officer said.
But Bharat returned to site and refused to move away from the place, leading the forest officials to launch a rescue operation, the DFO said.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
