{"id":20379,"date":"2024-01-01T03:20:38","date_gmt":"2024-01-01T03:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/?p=20379"},"modified":"2024-01-01T03:20:39","modified_gmt":"2024-01-01T03:20:39","slug":"the-elephants-who-destroy-livelihoods-and-lives-in-nepal-on-their-desperate-search-of-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2024\/01\/01\/the-elephants-who-destroy-livelihoods-and-lives-in-nepal-on-their-desperate-search-of-food\/","title":{"rendered":"The Elephants Who Destroy Livelihoods and Lives in Nepal on Their Desperate Search of Food"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>NEPAL, December 31, 2023 (NZCity): Elephants and farmers are an uneasy mix in Nepal, where a single hungry herd can destroy livelihoods \u2014 and take lives. It was midnight when the elephants came through the field where Kamal Rai used to work. He and his colleagues had just finished harvesting grass to store as hay in great, round, house-like structures, when a herd approached their paddy from across the river that divides Nepal from India. The elephants tramped through the fields, tearing chunks of grass from the mounds to eat. &#8220;People went to save [the grass], throwing hay lit with fire,\u201d Kamal says. &#8220;The elephants attacked to defend themselves.&#8221; This story isn\u2019t uncommon in Bahundangi, Jhapa, a region in Nepal that borders north-east India.<br><br>Elephants travel across the nearly mile-wide river that separates the countries in search of food.  They can suddenly appear out of the jungle, despite their size. In the dry season they traverse the river bed in one long line. During the monsoon, they swim. Deforestation on the Indian side of the border is to blame, Shankar Luitel says. Luitel is a Bahundangi local who has spent 22 years of his life monitoring the elephants and campaigning for their conservation. &#8220;[The] human population has been increasing rapidly so \u2026 people start to enter the jungle,&#8221; he says. Because of this, the elephants&#8217; habitat is being destroyed. They are being forced to look further afield for food, eventually traveling to Jhapa&#8217;s farming towns on the Nepali side of the border. The government has erected an electric fence along the border, designed to deter elephants from crossing into Nepal. But herds simply knock the fence down and continue on their way.<br><br>More at source.<br><a href=\"https:\/\/home.nzcity.co.nz\/news\/article.aspx?id=390569\n\">https:\/\/home.nzcity.co.nz\/news\/article.aspx?id=390569<br><\/a><br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEPAL, December 31, 2023 (NZCity): Elephants and farmers are an uneasy mix in Nepal, where a single hungry herd can,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20379"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20382,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20379\/revisions\/20382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}