In 2012, when Shanichara Bote lost his mother and father in a brutal elephant attack at the Baruwa bazaar in Madi, he knew he couldn’t continue living in the same place. The threat of wild animal attacks associated with wildlife encroachment had become too great, so he took the rest of his family, crossed the Rapti river and settled in the Jagatpur region of Nepal. Yet, somehow, that same elephant found them again and claimed two more members of the family.
On Sunday afternoon, Shanichara found himself in a state of profound shock once again, this time in the District Police Office of Chitwan, to report the loss of his 25-year-old daughter-in-law and his 4-year-old grandson to the same elephant that had violently trampled his parents 12 years before.
“We originally lived at Dropatinagar in the Madi area, but the constant terror of wild elephants forced us to sell what we had and migrate to Jagatpur,” Shanichara told the Kathmandu Post newspaper. We believed that moving across the major rivers would keep us safe. But after all these years, the exact same elephant found us again, raided our home, and took my daughter-in-law and my little grandson. There is nowhere left for us to run.”
Dhurbe, the elephant responsible for Shanichara’s tragedy, has a shocking history of violence that wildlife conservationists are well-familiar with. Over the past 23 years, the wild elephant is believed to have killed at least 25 people in the Chitwan National Park, Nepal’s first protected area. He has been so prolific that he even has his own Wikipedia page.
“We have been utilising a satellite tracking collar to monitor the movements of this highly aggressive male elephant,” a conservation official at Chitwan National Park said. “Prior to this tragic incident, Dhurbe had officially claimed 23 human lives. With these two latest casualties in Jagatpur, the confirmed number of fatalities attributed to this single elephant has now risen to 25.”
Experts believe Dhurbe’s violent behavior can be at least partly explained by how elephants deal with young males. They are aggressively driven away from their maternal herds by dominant males and forced into a solitary, frequently hostile existence. Dhurbe is believed to be the product of such a brutal banishing that saw him repeatedly finding his way into human settlements as foraging grounds.
Elephant attacks aren’t uncommon in countries like India and Nepal, but Shanichara Bote’s misfortune at the stomping legs of the same elephant, in separate attacks 14 years apart, is certainly unusual.
Featured Photo: Gautam Arora/Unsplash
