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This is Spike.
He's a six-year-old Asian elephant and he weighs a little more than two tons.
When he grows up, he'll be about nine feet tall
and weigh almost a hundred times more than the average man.
Hi, I'm George Page for Nature.
Compared with his African cousin,
Spike here has smaller ears, a double domed forehead, and a more rounded back.
The Asian elephant has also been much more successfully tamed and domesticated by man.
The elephant's tremendous strength and remarkable ability to learn
have served man for over 5,000 years,
as transportation in times of peace and to rout the enemy in times of war.
In India, the elephant is also revered and worshipped,
a god of wisdom and might.
At Hindu temples, herds of elephants are kept for use
in some of the most spectacular rites and ceremonies in the world.
But the relationship between man and elephant is also becoming strained.
The spread of agriculture is isolating the few remaining herds.
Man and the wild elephant are coming into conflict.
Our film was shot entirely in India by Naresh Bhati,
who is now devoting himself to capturing on film his country's rich natural diversity.
The Treachur Puran festival in southern India.
Thirty elephants parade through the temple gates.
Crowds assemble every year to worship the Hindu god Shiva,
as elephants carry ceremonial umbrellas and the processional image of the temple god.
But while these elephants have gained their own place in man's world,
their life in the wild is still a mystery.
Deep in the forest, elephants are on the move.
This film enters the last large area of wild elephant country in India
to record the natural behavior of the Asian elephant.
Never filmed before.
In freedom, the majestic bull roams his domain, the lord of the jungle.
India is home to the largest population of Asian elephants, estimated at more than 20,000.
The largest of the elephants is the Indian elephant,
which is the largest in the world.
The Indian elephant is the largest in the world.
India is home to the largest population of Asian elephants, estimated at more than 20,000.
About 6,000 live in this last stronghold in the south.
This is prime elephant habitat, ranging from wet evergreen
to dry thorn scrub forest, fringed by grassland.
In the large expanse of forest, the Asian elephant has its best chance for long-term survival in the wild.
These elephants used to be found in great numbers throughout Asia,
from Baghdad to Beijing in the north, south through India to Indonesia.
Now, only scattered remnants of this vast population survive in shrinking patches of forest.
African and Asian elephants differ considerably.
The African elephant is larger, with bigger ears, and both males and females have tusks.
The Asian elephant has a double-domed forehead, and only the male carries tusks.
Females have small, undeveloped tusks called tushars.
Elephants are the world's largest land mammals.
They're great size, as accompanied by an enormous appetite.
They consume more than 300 pounds of green fodder every day.
The trunk is a multipurpose, highly sensitive organ.
It's used in all aspects of elephant life, smelling, touching, drinking, and feeding.
Elephants are highly social, living in small family groups led by the dominant cow.
In this group, there are four young males.
Their tusks begin to grow when they're about two years old, and continue to grow throughout their lives.
Mature males are predominantly loners, only joining female herds for breeding.
Tusk development is genetically determined.
Non-tuskers, known as mukhnas, compensate by being more muscular, more aggressive, and having a thicker trunk.
But tusks are important weapons in the fights for status among the males.
Big tuskers are very rare today, because most have been killed for their valuable ivory.
This bull is about 35 years old, and in the wild may live to be 60.
He stands over 10 feet at the shoulder, and weighs about five tons.
Bulls periodically go through a condition known as musth, a phenomenon still not understood and shrouded in mystery.
During musth, a discharge exudes from temporal glands on each side of the head.
This bull forces the musth to flow by exerting pressure on his tusks.
A character change occurs during this period.
Bulls become temperamental, irritable, and extremely aggressive.
The condition has never been recorded for males under 10 years of age.
This male is beginning to go into musth, and his temporal glands have begun to swell.
On locating the soft soil near a waterhole, he drives his tusks into it.
It's believed that jarring the temporal glands helps to smooth the flow.
A sandpiper is unconcerned by such a large disturbance.
A wagtail is attracted to the scene. There are plenty of flies around elephant dung.
The bull touches his temporal glands to smell and feel if the flow has started.
In Corbett National Park, the elephant known as red ear is in full musth.
His left cheek is stained with a thick black fluid which has a strong scent.
To other males, it signals aggression.
To females, it indicates that the male is actively seeking a mate.
Red ear wanders from group to group, trying to locate a female inestrus.
Musth gives him added dominance.
Bulls and musth will not tolerate another adult male in the herd.
Seeing a younger bull, red ear moves briskly towards him.
The younger bull avoids confrontation by making a hasty retreat.
Red ear knows the strength of other bulls around the herd from earlier encounters.
The herd closes ranks. Another bull is seeking a female.
Red ear is challenged by a single tusk bull.
Tusks become dangerous weapons in the battle for dominance.
Excited by the jousting, the herd moves toward the contestants.
Serious injury could result if the two males were evenly matched.
But one tusk is no match for red ear.
He probably lost his other tusk in just such a fight.
Submission and defeat are inevitable.
With a long last look at what might have been, one tusk departs without much dignity.
As the victorious red ear approaches, two females inestrus turn, spread their hind legs and urinate, permitting him to test their reproductive status.
The herd moves inside the forest.
Red ear follows the two females inestrus.
A much younger bull joins the herd in the shade.
While one of the females is mounted, the other stands by, quietly dusting.
In general, it's the dominant bull which mates with the cows. Bull elephants can reproduce at any time, not necessarily when they're in must.
For such huge animals, it's all very gentle.
The bull slides his trunk along the back of his mate. This restrains her, preventing her from moving to one side to avoid mating.
For successful mating, there must be full cooperation from the female. Gentle nudging persuades her.
Mating is accomplished quickly, but will be repeated many times over the three to four days the cow remains inestrus.
As the male calves begin to reach sexual maturity at age 14 or 15, they make their first advances to the immature females.
This young female protests by squealing loudly, which alerts the older cows to rush in and intervene.
To the north, in the Chevali foothills, there are about 400 wild elephants.
They're encircled by modern development, and their traditional migration routes between feeding grounds have been cut off.
This great waterway feeds the Chilla hydroelectric power station near the holy city of Haridwar.
The canal was constructed without considering the needs of wildlife.
For centuries, elephants moved through here on their migrations. Today, they can't even drink water from the river.
The one time an elephant did try to drink here, he slipped and died.
The encroachment of modern development is also a problem in southern India.
Traditional elephant grounds have become valuable land for housing and agriculture. In the past 50 years, agricultural development has increased by an estimated 30 percent.
What was once elephant country is now covered by tea plantations.
The climate is ideal for growing spices like black pepper and also coffee.
Cattle as well compete for elephant territory.
Now the villages around the forest tend to keep a large number of cattle simply as dung producing machines.
These are used neither for draft nor for milk production, but simply they convert the forest biomass into cow dung, which is sold for a cash income.
Now this is the reason why there are a lot more cattle around the forest reserves than there are in a similar sized village situated away from the forest.
But in the whole process, the forest habitat gets severely damaged, the regeneration is suppressed, the wild herbivores have competition for food and the habitat degrades.
Even in designated areas such as Muda Malai, it's impossible to prevent grazing by domestic cattle.
About 10,000 cattle enter the reserve daily to graze within the forest.
Local people keep them only for their dung. After drying, it's sold as manure.
In the hot season, elephants gather in swampy areas for better grazing.
Local villagers also drive their buffaloes and cattle to this swamp.
Cattle compete directly for food with the wild herbivores.
They also increase the risks of spreading diseases like anthrax and foot and mouth disease.
The presence of cattle disturbs the elephants and they frequently attempt to chase them away.
The raised tail and indignant stomping are sure signs of elephant anger.
They're too many cattle and the elephants are forced to move away in search of less disturbed grazing areas.
To preserve the forage for elephants, a ban would have to be imposed on cattle grazing in this forest.
Dusting provides protection against the intense rays of the sun.
The dust lays on the back and acts as a shield.
As the sun rises in a summer sky, a herd seeks relief from the heat in the forest shade.
Sambar deer also graze here and become anxious at finding themselves surrounded by elephants.
The raised tail signals danger and they move off.
Elephants are finding the heat of the day too much. The need for shade is paramount.
But flies have found the shade too. This elephant uses a leafy branch to swat them away.
Elephant skin is rough and thick, but there are chinks in the armor, gaps between the wrinkles where blood sucking flies deliver stinging bites.
The sensitive skin around the eyes is especially vulnerable.
Flapping ears keep the flies on the move, but their presence isn't felt until their bite has pierced the skin.
It's only then that they're swatted away with a leafy twig, a tail, ears, or a trunk.
Despite their high casualties, the flies never give up.
Dusting though in inaccessible areas is the surest defense against the small predators.
The first to settle down for a snooze are the calves. They will sleep for hours if undisturbed.
During the heat of the day, elephants sleep. The positions of the sleepers are curious.
Some lie down, some sit and rest, while others sleep standing up like horses.
Surprisingly, this activity has been largely unnoticed by naturalists.
When feeling hot, an elephant will often put the tip of its trunk into its mouth and bring out saliva to spray over its body.
Elephants do not have sweat glands. To keep cool, they constantly fan their ears, which act as heat exchangers.
Waving this large surface area dispels excessive body heat.
When the 앞 aquí liters to st혹st
Siesta is over.
Most of the waking hours are spent foraging and feeding to sustain their enormous bulk.
They move from one grazing area to another.
The herd followed by an elderly bull moves away to find water.
Elephants travel to water once a day.
It's recently been discovered that they emit low frequency sounds to communicate.
They have poor eyesight, but their hearing and sense of smell are acute.
Raising their trunks to scent the air, they can detect friend or foe.
In water, the trunk becomes a hose.
They drink as much as 40 gallons of water a day.
This female is confounding all elephant stories.
She's not using her trunk, but drinking water directly through her mouth, a behavior never
before recorded.
Calves don't need much persuading to take a bath.
They become excited and noisy.
One young male, anxious to get into the water, pushes from the back of the line.
A wide expanse of water is necessary for such large bathers.
Humans love water and wallow and roll once the water takes the weight off their feet.
They're also expert swimmers.
The water becomes their playground.
Young and old enjoy it together.
Playing is an important part of family life.
C'mon!
After a bath, a good coat of mud protects their sensitive skins from insect bites and
sunburn.
Elephants scrape the soil with the forefeet, collected with their trunks and toss it under
their backs.
As the herd moves away through the forest to find the next grazing area, one female stays
behind.
She's heavily pregnant and appears to be in distress.
After a long pregnancy of 18 to 22 months, her time is near.
The labor pains have started.
Normally, elephants give birth in the standing position, but she seems to be having difficulty
and rocks her swollen belly on the ground, perhaps to help move the calf into position.
Another young female is close by for company.
She takes periodic rests between the moments of pushing and straining.
Five hours have passed in painful labor.
The unborn calf has been moved into position for its entry into the world.
Another addition to the family herd is about to be born.
The contractions become more intense, more tiring.
She kicks out a back leg to remove any obstructions.
She bends her rear legs, making the gap between them wider to ease the birth.
And from this position, the fetus doesn't have so far to fall.
At last, covered in the fetal membrane, the calf enters the world.
It's been a hard birth.
After all that effort, she moves closer, but there is no reassuring movement from the small
body.
The calf is stillborn.
The cow, not yet accepting her loss, kicks dust over the calf's body to dry it.
After all, she can't lick it clean, as most animals do.
But her efforts are in vain.
As the light begins to fade and the flying squirrels take up their nightly activity,
night draws a veil over a life that wasn't to be.
It's not until the next morning that the mother and her attendant abandon the dead calf and
move on to join the herd.
Here there are signs of another birth.
A calf must have been born during the night.
The newly born calf is unsteady.
Its legs hardly seem able to support it.
The cow and the attendant aunt carefully encourage the wobbly calf to stand on its own feet.
What's astonishing for such huge and heavy creatures is their tenderness.
They are truly gentle giants, never putting a foot wrong in maneuvering the tiny offspring.
The herd moves on and the calf, though still shaky, follows his mother anxiously.
At birth, the calf stands just under three feet and weighs about 200 pounds.
With the help of her trunk, the mother persuades the calf to keep moving.
Soon after birth, they can walk quite a distance.
Its mother's milk will be its major source of nourishment for the first six months of
life.
Cows have just two mammary glands to provide milk located between the front legs.
Calves are extremely hairy compared to adults.
Their eyes are quite red at birth, almost bloodshot.
He manages to find the nipple and suckles, keeping the trunk out of the way.
They may consume about 10 quarts of milk a day.
The mother is proud and possessive, but she needs the help of another cow to assist in
the protection and upbringing of the calf.
The aunt touches the mother's temporal region, which produces low-frequency sounds, too low
to be heard by human ears.
Through this communication, permission appears to have been given, and now the calf has double
protection.
Young calves are sleepy creatures.
It's kept between the mother and aunt so that it's not open to danger.
Tigers are known to attack such young calves.
The adults clear the vegetation around the baby.
Perhaps this could prevent a poisonous snake from creeping through the grass and biting
the calf.
They keep smelling the calf with their trunks to make sure he's all right.
The mother and aunt are forced to stand idle while the calf sleeps.
It's a tiring business bringing up youngsters.
When it's time to move, the mother wakes the calf gently by touching it.
The calf seems to be resting, but is also aware that its mother has already placed
it on paper.
When the calf makes sounds, it's the mother.
Tender, loving care is given constantly.
The touch of the trunk keeps reassuring the youngster
and helps guide him in the right direction.
Elephants normally give birth to a single calf.
Twins are a phenomenon.
These twins are brother and sister.
Now six months old, they're in the nursery school stage of their lives.
The calves learn about their environment by exploring it constantly.
They're very interested in the environment.
But with two very playful youngsters to protect,
the cow and ant have a full-time job.
Each calf knows exactly which is its feeding station
and makes for its particular side of the cow.
The tussle of play is just another form of learning.
Their trunks at this stage flap about without much muscle.
Music
Elephants make short migrations, usually sparked by the rains.
They tread the same tracks used for centuries by their ancestors.
Agriculture has spread into the reserves,
and sadly, elephants often come into conflict with their human neighbors.
Small settlements have developed inhabited by a few families
who cultivate the land.
The principal crops are ginger and rice.
Every year, their crops are damaged.
There are obvious signs of a jumbo invasion.
Cultivation has occupied some of the best habitats,
such as the river valleys, which contain fertile soil,
good plant growth, and a perennial supply of water.
It is therefore natural that elephants,
in the course of their seasonal movement,
when they come to occupy such habitats, encounter cultivation
and therefore enter the fields for breeding crops.
But I feel that ultimately crop breeding occurs
because the cultivated plants are far more palatable and nutritious
compared to the wild food plants of the elephants.
A bird may be scared away by a windblown white flag,
but not a tusker.
He goes where he wants.
Trampling the fields does more damage than stealing the harvest.
Many farmers lose 20% of their crops,
and in some areas, no compensation is given for crop damage.
The adult male elephants raid crops much more frequently than the female herds.
And even among the adult males,
there are certain very notorious bulls,
which are very bold and enter the fields
without bothering about all the noise
and the bursting of crackers by the farmers.
The villagers are trying to scare the invader.
Park rules do not permit them to use firearms.
Every year, elephants kill 150 people,
many while trying to protect their crops.
The government is considering relocating these villages
and returning these areas to the wild animals.
Given adequate compensation,
the people here would be willing to move.
This relocation is still in the planning stages.
In some areas, state governments are digging trenches
to protect crops against raiding elephants.
The trench is usually 6 feet deep and 3 feet wide with tapering sides.
But all this effort is not proving very useful.
The trenches easily silt up, and the elephants walk across.
An elephant's diet also includes bark from their favorite trees,
such as gravia.
The males use their tusks to lift off the bark.
They destroy much more than they eat.
Stripped of the bark that protects them from insects and disease,
the trees die.
Females also debark using their small tushars.
In southern India, another major threat to the elephant population is poaching.
On average, more than 100 tuskers are killed each year.
This young male, no more than 10 years old,
escaped from poachers with a massive wound on his forehead.
A bullet has entered one side of his temple and emerged on the other side.
His days are numbered.
Poaching is done by organized gangs.
They live in the forest, and having wounded their quarry,
simply wait for it to die to collect their ill-gotten gains.
Elephants move to water to pass their final hours.
The tusks of this casualty have been chopped away.
It's seldom one can see these elderly bulls with tusks nearly reaching the ground.
Most of them have fallen to poachers.
The days of this one, too, are numbered.
It's been shot by a rifle bullet just above the eye.
The government machinery to protect the elephant is very weak.
There are not enough men, and those men who are out there are very poorly equipped.
They don't have enough wireless facilities, enough vehicles, enough good ammunition or arms.
So unless more funds are sunk into this, it's a losing battle.
Poachers move fast, taking only the tusks to sell them illegally to ivory traders.
The problem is that the elephant poaching cases are detected by the forest department,
which does not have a separate legal cell or the manpower to prosecute them in the court.
So these cases are handed over to the police.
Now the police have a different set of priorities.
Elephant poaching comes way down their list.
As a result, the prosecution is not very vigorously carried on.
Poachers are rarely caught by the foresters.
This time, a culprit has been caught in possession of a muzzle-loading gun nearly six feet long.
He's being questioned.
Several poachers who are caught are immediately released on some kind of a bail or the other,
and they continue their activities.
So a creation of a separate legal cell within the forest department for prosecuting these cases,
as well as tightening up of the judicial system to make it more effective, are both needed.
India is the second largest exporter of ivory products in the world.
There are about 7,000 traditional carvers.
Until recently, there was no control of the ivory trade.
The
works of art from carved ivory are in demand all over the world.
In 1986, the government introduced new laws banning the trade in Indian ivory.
The traders may do business in African ivory, but they must register and declare their stocks periodically.
The government hopes that this will discourage the poachers by making it much more difficult to do business.
But implementing the law has not proven easy.
Once it has been carved, there is no obvious difference between African and Indian ivory.
Ironically, Ganesh, the elephant god made from ivory, is on display.
The real Lord of the Jungle is now in serious trouble.
The symbols of his male dominance have become his death warrant.
The bullet wound is above the eye.
He blows water on it and feels it with his trunk.
He seems in great agony, and the wound has become infected.
Unfortunately, he's carrying a large price on his head.
His tusks are nearly six feet long and worth almost nine thousand dollars.
The poachers had been following the animal.
Four months later, he finally died.
All that remained of this magnificent animal was this dried up skeleton.
Poachers have taken such a toll of large tuskers that to continue the illegal trade, young bulls only five years old are now being killed.
Their tusks are just a few inches long.
This selective killing is leading to an imbalance of the sexes.
This could have catastrophic results on the fertility of the elephant population.
Their whole existence is threatened.
To survive, they need to have large protected areas.
Ironically, elephants have been instrumental in the destruction of the forests they need.
For centuries, their great strength and intelligence have worked for man, hauling timber and clearing land for agriculture and settlement.
Between 1972 and 1982, 150 million acres of forest in India were cleared.
India is now working hard to protect its remaining forests and reserves, wildlife sanctuaries and national parks.
Through this ancient partnership, it's man's turn to work for the elephant, to preserve its habitat and ensure its survival in the wild.
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