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Kenyan Rangers Kill Rogue Jumbos After Fatal Human Attacks
Nairobi (AFP) Aug 31, 2006 Kenyan wildlife rangers in choppers killed a pair of rogue elephants this week after a series of fatal attacks on people in incidents highlighting growing human-animal conflict, officials said Thursday. The rampaging bulls, blamed by locals for leading larger groups of jumbos onto farms to raid crops, were shot dead on Sunday and Wednesday near the famed Maasai Mara National Reserve and a ranch in central Kenya, the officials said. In addition, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said it was tracking a third elephant believed to have been involved in an attack Monday in which one woman was killed. On Wednesday, KWS rangers tracked down and killed an elephant suspected of three fatal attacks on humans near the central town of Nanyuki after it raided a ranch and injured a farmhand, an official said. "We had been tracking its movement for the last two years, but with the help of a helicopter we managed to bring it down yesterday," said the deputy KWS warden for the area, Richard Lemarikat. "We have been monitoring it because we think it has killed three people in the last two years," he told AFP from Nanyuki, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Nairobi. In a separate incident Monday in the nearby Aberdare forest, more than 10 elephants attacked a group of women collecting firewood, killing one of them and prompting authorities there to begin a hunt. "About seven women were attacked," Jane Gitau, a KWS warden in the town of Nyahururu adjacent to the forest, told AFP. "One was injured and she died on her way to hospital." Meanwhile, KWS rangers in helicopters on Sunday drove several large groups of elephants off farms on the outskirts of the Maasai Mara reserve during an operation in which they shot dead a bull believed to have killed a man that day, officials said. Conflict between humans and wildlife, particularly elephants, is on the increase in Kenya as population pressures, drought and other weather conditions push farmers onto once unused land in many parts of the country.
Elephants stroll into Sumatran city The pair of pachyderms were found calmly munching on trees and bushes on the outskirts of Pekanbaru, a provincial capital on Sumatra island, police said. "The two elephants, both male, are currently in a plot of land in a residential area," said a local policeman who identified himself only as Duplis. Forestry officials said the wild elephants may having been escaping land clearing in Riau province, where forest fires have been raging for several weeks. "They might have been driven out of their habitat because of the fires. For the moment we will just keep them safe there until a decision is taken," said Uus Suherna, a forest warden at the Nature Conservancy Office. He declined to say where the elephants might have come from, but his colleague Nukman suggested they could have come from the nearby Minas forestry park. Riau has been one of the provinces in Sumatra island worst hit by ground and forest fires which have sent thick haze into the sky in the area in the past weeks. The fires, an annual hazzard, are mostly blamed on plantation and estate owners using fire to clear land for the next crop. Suherna said that forest wardens had been sent to the site "to see what could be done, how we can get them to leave the city and go back into the forests." Police had been deployed to the site to keep the curious at bay for fear that the elephants might be frightened and run amok, Duplis said. The World Wildlife Fund conservation group said in April that elephants in Sumatra, the only Indonesian island where they are found, were dying at an alarming pace with numbers dropping by 75 percent in just 18 years. As of 2003, only about 354 to 431 elephants remained, the group said. The natural habitat of elephants is being increasingly taken over by resettlement, plantations and industrial forest estates, they said.
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Chimpanzees Can Transmit Cultural Behavior to Multiple Generations
Atlanta GA (SPX) Aug 31, 2006Transferring knowledge through a chain of generations is a behavior not exclusive to humans, according to new findings by researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. |
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