Posted on 11/12/2017 10:25:15 PM PST by beaversmom
The back legs of the baby elephant are consumed by fire as it chases after its startled mother, screaming.
In the chilling photo, a flaming ball of tar...the source of the fire, along with a few hurled firecrackers — is frozen in the air as a crowd sprints away from the petrified pachyderms.
Many things in the photo are unclear: the fate of the calf and its mother, the reason the men are attacking them on a road cut through a forest, whether the practice has a formal name or is just a random bit of sadism.
But in an instant, the image — titled “Hell Is Here” and snapped by Biplab Hazra — has shined a light on some of the darkest moments of the conflict between humans and elephants in India, whose lives increasingly overlap in what will soon be the world’s most populous nation.
In his entry to Sanctuary Wildlife’s Photography awards, Hazra describes what happened when the mob met the large animals:
[The] calf screams in confusion and fear as the fire licks at her feet. Flaming tar balls and crackers fly through the air to a soundtrack of human laughter and shouts. In the Bankura district of West Bengal this sort of humiliation of pachyderms is routine, as it is in the other elephant-range states of Assam, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu and more.
Hazra’s photo won the top prize at the Sanctuary awards, which drew 5,000 entries from across Asia. Eight photographers were awarded prizes.
People even jeered at Hazra for snapping a photo of the elephant torture instead of doing something to help.
More than 60 percent of the world’s Asian elephants live in India as its human population balloons, spreading into migration routes and feeding grounds the animals have used for centuries.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
You know, if you’re going to kill an animal because you need an area to be free from it (and there’s no safe alternative, like moving them), well OK - just kill them in the quickest and most humane way possible. This is just sick.
Worse if it is just for entertainment. Of course, the elephants probably don’t know the difference or care...they just know that they are being tortured.
SICK, SICK, SICK!!!!!
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