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Elephants lost and found

Sometimes what you think was lost was merely misplaced, even if it was an elephant. Conservationists assessing the near-disappearance of the wild elephants of Myanmar discovered them hard at work out of the wild, hauling logs. [Link]

Although the capture of wild elephants was banned in 1995, it is thought that people continue to round up animals that raid crops or otherwise bother humans. The group presenting in Brazil guesses that at present there are about 6,000 animals in human hands.

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It may be that the elephants' usefulness in the logging camps is the best way to encourage locals to save the species, [Peter] Leimgruber [of Smithsonian's National Zoological Park] says. The animals do a good job, he adds, and cause relatively little pollution. "I'd rather have the forest logged by an elephant than by heavy machinery," he says.

jon posted this at 7:30 AM
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