The elephant seems to kick the motorbike out of irritation at its presence. I think he sees it as a potential threat, as an animal, and kicks it to ensure that it doesn’t bother him. Perhaps, in India, elephants are used to seeing humans on motorbikes and therefore when they see a motorbike, they also see a human abuser and give it a kick like this. And I have this strong feeling because of the body language that this elephant is thoroughly pissed off. He’s marching through the human urban jungle as the humans took his land from him and he wants payback. He wants to hurt a human and damage their property. Look, if an elephant is pissed off with humans, he’ll have a good reason for it. There is a lot of abuse of elephants in India, where this video was made. Perhaps he is looking for revenge for the abuse of his friends.
Do a Google search for abuse of elephants in India and a pile of webpages come up. The top page states that elephant handlers beat elephants with weapons and traumatise them. They chain them up and force them to perform gruelling work. They neglect their health and are violent towards them. The elephants become malnourished and dehydrated.
And young elephants are taken from their mums and confined to a small place. They are abused with sticks spiked with nails. They are starved and deprived of sleep, in order to crush their spirit and become submissive to horrible humans.
The BBC has an article of April 2018 about the tragic lives of India’s mistreated, captive elephants. There a most distressing story of a 42-year-old temple elephant who lay on a sandy spot for a month because her forelimbs and femur were broken and she was covered in sores.
An animal lover made a court application to have her euthanised. She died before the vets could euthanise her. The female elephant had led a hard life since she was sold to a temple in Tamil Naidu in 1990. She had to stand on stone floors for hours on end to bless devotees and perform rituals like bringing water to the deities.
She fell from an open truck on the way to a rejuvenation camp for elephants in 2004 and broke a leg. The leg healed but it was misshapen and she lived in pain until her death. She also broke her femur when the authorities used an earthmover to flip her and treat her.
She just wasted away to her death. There are 4,000 captive elephants in India. According to a World Animal Protection report India is the place where taming and using elephants for the benefit of humans first began thousands of years ago.
There have been stories of elephants losing their cool and simply saying to the world that enough is enough and rampaging at festivals and killing participants. These are intelligent animals. We’ve seen them caring for their young indicating intelligence and gentleness.
Elephants are rented out during religious festivals where they have to suffer noisy parades and processions. They are often chained and saddled to be used for tourist rides up and down steep slopes or to entertain tourists in other ways.
There are media reports of 70 young captive elephants dying under natural conditions when young in three states: Kerala, Tamil Naidu and Rajasthan between 2015 and 2017. In 2018 12 captive elephants died in Kerala. The deaths were due to bad animal caregiving, overwork, abuse or simply torture according to the president of the Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre, Suparna Ganguly.
Captive elephants are removed from their natural habitat and shackled for long hours and concrete sheds with stone floors. They often end up getting foot rot when their feet develop abscesses and their pads become thinner. This can lead to severe infection. Their eyes can be affected by bright sun. The cause? The gross ignorance of their owners.
And their diet is often very poor. Many of them suffer from intestine infection, septicaemia and lung related infections because they only have access to glucose-rich dried sugarcane fodder when they normally eat a hundred different kinds of roots, shoots, grasses, foliage and tubers.
In Kerala, the life expectancy of captive elephants is below 40 years whereas 20 years ago they lived up to 75 years. There are only five rescue centres dealing with elephants in all of India. It is said that an owner of an elephant in Kerala can make up to ₹70,000 in a single day at a religious festival during the festival season. This is $1053 which in India is an enormous sum of money.
The abusive of all animals ultimately is down to human greed and exploitation to make money. Commercialism trumps conservation and compassion. It is highly depressing for someone like me to read about the stories. The ignorance knows no bounds. The world is so badly disjointed.
Below are some pages on elephants which may interest you.
