A female wild elephant, aged around 35, was gunned down by two siblings, who are farmers, near Mettupalayam in the Coimbatore Forest Division limits on Wednesday night.
A bullet fired from a country-made rifle pierced through the left ear of the elephant and was retrieved from its brain during the post-mortem. Autopsy findings suggested that the jumbo could have been shot in the past as it had an old wound on its shoulder, from which two steel pellets were removed.
It is suspected that the elephant was the mother of a calf aged under one year. The calf was seen in the forest periphery along with a few other elephants when the carcass was found on land belonging to the Public Works Department (PWD) at Kandiyoor on Thursday morning.
District Forest Officer D. Venkatesh said that G. Ramasamy, 55, and his brother G. Krishnasamy, 66, of Thekkampatty, both farmers, shot the elephant at Kandiyoor. “Their motive was not poaching as it was a female elephant. The country-made rifle which they used to shoot the animal has been recovered,” he said. The two reportedly confessed to Forest Department officials that they shot the elephant to protect their crops raised on leased land.
According to Forest Department sources, four female elephants, a male elephant and a calf strayed on to the PWD land at Kandiyoor late on Wednesday.
Second death
On Thursday, another female elephant, aged about 20, was found dead within the limits of the Sirumugai forest range. The elephant was ailing for about a week before it died.
With the deaths of the two elephants, the number of elephants that died in Coimbatore Forest Division since January this year rose to 14, of which seven were from the Sirumugai range.
N.I. Jalaludheen of Nature Conservation Society, a Coimbatore-based non-governmental organisation, said that an expert committee should be formed to study the reasons for elephant deaths in places along the migratory path that ranges between Wayanad in Kerala and Hasanur in Erode district during mating season this year.
Tusker electrocuted
Meanwhile, a tusker was electrocuted on the premises of a private resort at Masinagudi in the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR) on Thursday.
L.C.S. Srikanth, Deputy Director of MTR, said the tusker, aged 16-18, had ventured into the resort, Bamboo Banks, and was eating bamboo shoots inside the property when a power cable snapped and fell on it.