Wild elephant killed by poisoned arrow

Police have launched manhunt operations against poachers who killed one wild elephant in Par Paw village in Singu township in Mandalay Region.

The elephant, estimated to be 40years old, was killed on Saturday according to villagers, U Tint Swe, director of the Mandalay Region Department of Forestry told The Myanmar Times on Monday.

“The elephant was killed by a poisoned arrow fired from a percussion rifle. As the site is near a residential area, tusk and skin were not removed and taken from the dead elephant. We are investigating the incident in cooperation with the police,” U Tint Swe said.

‘The elephant was killed by a poisoned arrow fired from a percussion rifle.’ - U Tint Swe, director, Mandalay Forestry Department

“In March, one wild elephant was also killed in nearby Thabeikkyin township. Elephant killings are quite frequent in our areas. There are some preventive measures that have been initiated but killings,” an official of Singu township Department of Forestry, who requested anonymity, said.

Combined teams of police and Department of Forestry officials have been dispatched to hunt down the suspects and a case was opened under section 41 (a) of the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Law at Letpanhla police station by the forest department.

“As the areas in Thabeikkyin and Singu are surrounded by forests, many wild elephants dwell there. So there are also many poachers. With the help of the police, these poachers could be arrested if they can be pursued deep into the jungle,” a resident from Letpanhla village U Thaung Tun said.

The Department of Forestry said seven wild elephants have been killed in Mandalay Region over the last two years.

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‘Two key factors to end jumbo deaths’

KOTA KINABALU: Identifying the source of poisoning and improving the layout of the electric fencing are among key tasks that need to be tackled quickly in overcoming the deaths of Borneo pygmy elephants.

A Sabah-based conservationist Dr Marc Ancrenaz said the post-­mortems had yet to give a conclusive cause over the jumbo’s recent deaths, though suspicion was that it might be poisoning of their food and water sources.

“What is happening now is that most of these elephants are coming out of the forests to forage and may be consuming water and food sources that might be contaminated by fertilisers or chemicals,” he said.

“We need to find the source of the poisoning. So far, investigators cannot pinpoint any poison in the dead elephants’ blood stream.”

A total of 18 pygmy elephants have died since April. The motive behind more than half of the deaths could not be ascertained.

The others were killed by hunters’ traps or died due to natural causes.

Dr Ancrenaz said another concern was the setting up of electric fences haphazardly by plantation and farm owners.

“These elephants sometimes manage to slip through the gaps between the electric fences, but could not get out of the fenced area, causing further human-elephant conflict,” he said.

Dr Ancrenaz said such electric fencing should be placed with an overview of the landscape to minimise conflicts triggered by fragmented forests in the elephants’ natural roaming area.

Noting that the state government was setting up a task force to look into the deaths, Dr Ancrenaz said it was important to get advice from experts handling the human-elephant conflict in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India.

Though Sabah’s wild elephant population is only about 1,500 to 2,000, he said they were breeding well.

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