Drone records dozens of elephants eating garbage in Sri Lanka

Every day, dozens of elephants leave the jungle in eastern Sri Lanka to search for food in landfills.

The three largest in the country are located next to protected areas and it is common to see these large mammals stirring with their trunks among the piles of plastic, paper and other waste to find some plant debris to put in their mouth.

A drone has now captured dozens of them from a bird's eye view starring in one of these bleak scenes.

He has done it in the Ampara landfill, created about a decade ago in the middle of a corridor where between 200 and 300 elephants live.

Not even electric fences have prevented them from making their way to the garbage.

Not only do they eat food scraps, they also swallow plastics, something that is slowly killing them.

In 2019, 361 died, a figure that is a sad record.

The government is digging trenches around the Ampara landfill to curb the elephants, but local residents are confident that they will not work and that nothing will keep them away while the facility is still there.

And animals are not the only victims.

Their coexistence with neighbors is complicated, since they enter neighborhoods and damage citizens and their properties, according to a local farmer, PH Kumara, told Reuters.