Guwahati: In a rather interesting and strange behaviour, a wild elephant was spotted eating a helmet in Guwahati. The incident happened near the Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary in Satgaon area of the city. The act was caught on a phone camera and the video has gone viral.
In the video it can be clearly seen that the elephant is walking on the street, a bike is parked by the road-side and the helmet is kept on the handle of the bike. The elephant stops near the bike, as if looking for food or something, he then lifts his trunk, picks the helmet and gobbles it down and walks away.
The elephant is said to have walked out from the Sanctuary looking for food. Wild elephants are known to walk out of the forest areas of Assam looking for food.
This incident took place in the Satgaon army camp in Narangi area of Guwahati. It is located near the Sanctuary.
The owner of the bike and his friend were filming the whole episode. They never thought that the elephant would eat the helmet.
When the elephant stopped near the bike, the duo did understand that the mammal was looking for food, but never in their wildest of dreams did they think that it would gulp down the helmet.
The owner of the bike can be heard in the video saying, "My helmet is gone, how will I go now?"
Between 2015-2019, there has been around 1,169 man-elephant conflict incidents reported from different parts of Assam.
According to state Forest Minister Parimal Suklabaidya, 91 people had died due to man-elephant conflict in 2016, another 83 died in 2017, 98 people died in 2018 and 87 people died in 2019. As many as 263 incidents were reported in 2016, 398 in 2017, 293 in 2018 and 215 in 2019. In 2020 and this year too, several instances of man-elephant encounters have been reported.
In a very recent incident reported from outside the Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary, a 11-year old boy died after elephants from the Sanctuary walked out at night and trampled the hut that the child and his family were sleeping in.
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