Elephants are amazing creatures. Though usually called ‘gentle giants’, the elephants can be quite temperamental and if disturbed, dangerous to anyone who is within a trunk’s reach. While watching elephants on the jungle drives, it is impotent to maintain distance from elephants as they get stressed out if we breach their personal space which can be several dozens of meters or more. Elephants migrate, following their traditional migration routes. Throughout their distribution range these routes have been disturbed due to ever increasing human population pressure. We have cut down their forests and created farmland, roads, railway lines, canals, villages, towns and cities. While crossing through these artificial landscapes, elephants are subjected to a lot of man-elephant conflict. It is common to come across instances when elephant herds are chased by mobs, shouting and often blowing crackers to scare them or they are fired at to drive them away. They are also subjected to accidents on roads and railway lines.
After all this trouble that the elephants go through, and when they eventually arrive in a sanctuary or a national park, they have to deal with another kind of man-animal conflict. This is when they are flocked by the jeep riding wildlife tourists who sometimes want to go close to them to get pictures and in the process end up defeating the whole purpose of a safari in a sanctuary or the national park. Often this is the result of lack of proper photography equipment. It is not uncommon to come across people who want to film wildlife using their mobile phone cameras that are inadequate for the purpose.
We, at Jim’s Jungle Retreat, believe in sensible tourism where we ensure that wild animals and their personal space is respected and that they are not put through periods of stress by close proximity of jeeps and tourists. We watch them from a safe distance.
One beautiful evening, this magnificent lone tusker was filmed by Jim’s Jungle Retreat naturalists using high-magnification photography equipment from a respectable distance on a safari in a patch of the jungle close to the Retreat.