Kuppam: Two persons were killed by tuskers at Kuppam in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district on Friday, while in another incident four elephants got electrocuted at Katragadda village in Parvathipuram Manyam district.
At 5:25 am, Usha (42) was waiting to take a bus to Bengaluru along with three people at a bus station when elephants attacked. It resulted in her death but the others managed to escape.
Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Wildlife Shanti Priya Pandey told PTI: One of the two tuskers was in musth — a time when the animal’s hormones are at elevated levels and it discharges a secretion from the temporal ducts on the sides of its head as well as becomes aggressive.
Besides Usha, the tuskers also killed a person named Sivalingam, a 70-year-old man who went out to relieve himself in the morning at 6.30. Chittoor District Forest Officer (DFO) Chaitanya Kumar Reddy said that people were warned of elephant movements, especially of the two tuskers which strayed from Krishnagiri in Tamil Nadu.
According to the DFO, these two elephants were driven away by people and forest officials from Krishnagiri into Chittoor district. Meanwhile, a herd of four elephants — a male, two females and a calf — were electrocuted at Katragadda village in Parvathipuram Manyam district in the northeastern part of the state when they tried to uproot an electric transformer, Pandey said. “The inquisitiveness of the calf proved fatal to all four. All the elephants’ trunks were charred but the trunk of the calf was fully burnt, it is learnt,” the senior forest official said.
According Pandey, they had information about six elephants entering the region when the quartet was likely meddling with the transformer on Thursday night. She said that close contact among the four elephants could have resulted in their instantaneous death due to electrocution. Officials found that the transformer had been moved a bit by the jumbos.
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