Enlarge image
Elephant herd near the Indian city of Siliguri (symbol image)
Photo: Diptendu Dutta / AFP
In India, a man got caught in a herd of elephants and died.
The elephants trampled him to death, according to the Times of India, citing forest officials.
Accordingly, the animals attacked the 26-year-old forester when he tried to keep the elephants away from a village in the state of Andhra Pradesh with a torch.
He was supposed to drive the wild animals out of the inhabited area because they had destroyed cotton plants there in the days before.
Fatal encounters between humans and elephants are a regular occurrence in India, and according to Indian Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav, they are on the increase.
He told the Indian news magazine Outlook.
According to this, around 500 people would die every year in such incidents with elephants.
Elephants, leopards, tigers
But other wild animals continue to cause concern for the residents of the Asian country.
In December, a leopard attacked people and injured at least 15 people.
At the time of the attacks, the animal had been foraging in the city of Jorhat in the state of Assam since the beginning of the week, a forest official told the Times of India.
In October, after a hunt involving more than 200 people, a tiger notorious as the "Camparan man-eater" was shot dead.
According to police in the east of the country, police officers shot the predator after it had killed at least nine people.
Around 75 percent of all tigers in the world live in India.
According to statistics, almost 225 people were killed by tigers in the country between 2014 and 2019.
With the deforestation of forests, human settlements sometimes move very close to the habitat of the predators.
This can lead to these people or their livestock attacking – and people then killing the animals, sometimes out of revenge.
bam/dpa
