What was meant to be a happy
ending turned out to be
just the opposite.
It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever seen
in terms of animal behaviour in the wild.
Hi, my name is Ashwika Kapur.
I’m a wildlife filmmaker based in Calcutta, India.
So when I was young, I used to travel up
a lot to the northern part of the state.
So North Bengal, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
As a child,
I used to go a lot to that region because my dad worked for a tea company.
All of Dooars is like a patchwork
of forests, villages, and tea plantations.
Because the forests are so close to the villages,
and the tea plantations, they’re just absolutely adjacent to each other.
We used to see a lot of wildlife there.
You’ll see elephant conflict stories in the news quite often from North Bengal
because they constantly come into contact with human beings.
It’s one of the trickiest places on Earth for elephants to exist really,
because this is a completely human dominated landscape.
This particular incident that I remember,
although it happened a very, very long time ago,
it’s sort of burned into my memory
because it was probably one of the hardest things
I’ve ever seen in terms of animal behavior in the wild.
We were staying at at a standard tea garden, a big bungalow in the tea garden.
We had finished dinner.
It was evening.
It was after sunset.
When out of the blue, suddenly we started hearing
a whole lot of noise coming from the village area.
People were shouting and we could hear drums
and we could hear all kinds of noise.
And one of the most telltale signs were these
big firecrackers that were being shot up into the air.
That was a straight-cut telltale sign that elephants
had strayed into the village or into the paddy field.
People had to collect a really large number as make a lot of noise.
They use firecrackers and they just shout a lot and beat drums
just to be able to sort of drive the herd back into the forest.
They come to forage.
The paddy fields are right there, it’s easy food for them.
And they essentially come to raid the paddy fields.
As soon as we heard this big noise coming from the village area,
within minutes I remember we just piled into this one vehicle.
By the time we reached, of course, they had already quite
successfully managed to drive most of the herd back into the forest.
And in that chaos, initially, I didn’t notice that there was a whole different story
playing out on another side of the paddy field.
There was one very small elephant, tiny, absolutely tiny, elephant
that was left behind by the herd.
In that moment, I didn’t at all
feel like the villagers were trying to harm her.
There was just a lot of chaos, a lot of excitement.
There is obviously conflict in that region in the sense
that people have to protect their paddy fields and have to protect
what keeps them alive and keeps their families fed.
So in that sense, there is conflict because they have to get the elephants
to go back into the forest.
But in terms of animosity towards the elephants,
the beauty and the complexity of North Bengal
is that the people don’t necessarily feel like the elephants are their enemies.
Not at all actually.
I remember coming back that night and asking ‘Dad,
what’s going to happen to that baby elephant?’
The manager of the of the tea plantation said, ‘Look, this happens.
This is not unusual.
This happens, and the Forest Department takes care of it.
They will sometime over the next few days try and find the herd
that this baby belongs to and reunite the
the calf with the herd.’
The tea garden manager.
had made a few calls saying that
when you are dealing with it, let us know when we, you know, if we can witness it.
And somebody gave him a call letting him know that
they had found the herd that this baby belonged to
and they were going to take the calf to the herd and
reunite the calf with the family.
We piled into this car.
I remember it was quite a long drive.
I was very surprised at how far the herd had travelled
overnight and from a vantage point, we could see this big elephant herd,
on the other side of the riverbed,
I remember standing there and watching the Forest Department
people sort of try and guide this tiny,
quivering, helpless, sort of tired calf,
trying to sort of direct this calf towards the elephant herd.
But what was meant to be
a happy ending, is what I was expecting, turned out to be
just the opposite.
The mother was constantly ignoring the calf
and walking off, not paying any attention to this calf.
When she finally managed to get really close
to the herd and almost got like right inside it,
the mother turned around,
trumpeted really loudly
and sort of pushed this calf, full force, with her trunk.
Essentially rejecting her.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Elephants are in my mind.
They are supposed to be these loving, caring,
gentle giants, especially when it comes to their own families.
They’re so protective of their babies, they’re tender with their babies.
They are like the ultimate symbols of matriarchs in the wild.
What I saw in front of me was just, it was just betrayal.
It was cold betrayal.
And what looked like cruelty.
And there came a point where this herd sort of disappeared into the forest.
And this calf was just standing there alone, waiting to sort of, I don’t know,
just waiting to understand where to go next.
And the Forest Department at that point sort of stepped in again
and guided guided her back towards the car and put her back onto the truck.
And that was that.
The one thing that I was quite clearly told
is that the survival chances of a calf that small
is quite, is quite low.
Because the survival chances of that calf may not be particularly great,
there is a chance that the herd,
the mother, will reject that baby,
knowing that she may not make it.
I’ve tried to find out why this happens and tried to look into the science
of why it happened.
In most cases, it seemed to sort of
suggest that elephants
tend to reject calves
in particularly stressful environments.
But in this particular region, this is not unusual
because these elephants live
under some of the most stressful conditions on the planet.
They are living in an area which is surrounded by human habitation,
and they are constantly and constantly in conflict with people all the time.
And they can’t move from one region to another without constantly
coming in contact with people.
And therefore there’s that conflict. And they are such a complex species
when it comes to sort of emotional evolution,
and you expect a very different side to elephants, but then you wonder
whether the circumstances changes that narrative.
