Why did the once docile elephant become so terrible?

According to statistics, from 20 1 1 to 20 15, there were more than 48,000 cases of wild Asian elephants eating, destroying crops and attacking people in many areas of Yunnan, which directly caused tens of millions of economic losses. There is a group of 18 wild Asian elephants near Menghai County, Yunnan Province. In more than 20 years, a * * * caused more than 300 injuries and more than 50 people died on the spot.

Many people must be very shocked after reading this set of data. Are wild Asian elephants really that terrible? Why do elephants, which were originally very smart and docile in our impression, become so violent and easy to attack humans? There are many reasons for this. First, let's look at the aggression of wild elephants.

Many people think that the elephant must walk very slowly, because it is huge. This is a very wrong cognition. You know, although Asian wild elephants look huge and bulky, they are actually more flexible than humans, especially in the jungle. Asian elephant is the second land animal after African elephant. Their body length can reach 5 to 6 meters, their height is more than 3 meters, and their weight is 4 to 5 tons. In the jungle, it is an object that even the tiger, the king of the forest, dare not provoke. Compared with humans, it is smaller. Such absolute strength and size are enough to easily cross the jungle.

Therefore, when chased by wild elephants, don't try to escape into the jungle, and don't climb to a big tree to escape, because it is absolutely impossible to escape from the "claws" of elephants. Be sure to run to the open field, so that you can clearly see the elephant's attack and forward route and have a greater chance of escape.

According to local villagers, a long time ago, people and elephants lived in harmony here, and there were few incidents of attacking people or entering the village to destroy them. But since someone killed the local elephant, all this has changed ..... It turned out that a group of local poachers came here to attack the elephant in the early days, which caused the elephant to be disturbed and the first murder occurred. Later, some elephants were killed by some extreme villagers because they accidentally entered the crops of some local villagers for food. As a result, there have been many "retaliation" of elephants.

Because elephants are very intelligent animals, their brains have neurons highly similar to human beings and developed hippocampus, which makes their emotional intelligence and IQ among the best in the animal kingdom. They will mourn collectively and cry for their dead companions.

Around some villages in Menghai County, it was a primitive jungle decades ago. In recent years, it has been transformed and planted with rubber forests. In this way, these ecological forests have become pieces of rubber forests, and nothing can grow under the rubber forests because of the use of herbicides, which has brought the destruction of biodiversity to the local area. Such a chain reaction makes the local wild Asian elephants not only lose their habitat, but also lose many food sources and have to enter human villages and crops for food. In order to protect their crops, humans sometimes attack and frighten these elephants, so there have been many elephant wounding incidents.

Finally, in fact, people live in peace, and the most important thing is ecological restoration. Because protecting biodiversity means protecting their habitats. We still have a long way to go to bring Asian elephants back to a real home.