Free from animals
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“Hello what are you doing ?” “Shh … Exercise.” Silence in the ranks.” Like Mowgli, the hero of Jungle Book, awakened during his nap by an elephant patrol, we would have liked to go interview a baby elephant. But for lack of knowing how to make animals like Rudyard Kipling speak, we will never know what prompted fifteen wild pachyderms to leave the Xishuangbanna reserve, in southwest China, where they had until then lived exclusively, and to head north before returning to their starting point. A historical epic that fascinated millions of Chinese for seventeen months.
It was in March 2020 that a troop made up of adults, adolescents and children, left their natural habitat to embark on an adventure. Asian elephants, although somewhat smaller than their African cousins, do not go unnoticed, with an average height of three meters at the withers. Their hunting was not banned until 1988 when the species was on the verge of extinction, with only 150 surviving. Protected, they are now around 300 living in southern Yunnan, a mountainous and wooded region on the border of Laos and Burma.
Fatal accidents
Although we do not know what triggered this long trip, some observers assure that their reserve has shrunk in recent years, fragmented by the plantations of rubber (the rubber tree) and indigestible tea. In addition, the pachyderms would not have …
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