Official: 4 rare elephants poisoned in Indonesia
Pastor Dale Morgan
Official: 4 rare elephants poisoned in Indonesia*
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 4, 2009; 9:39 AM
PEKANBARU, Indonesia -- Four rare Sumatran elephants were found dead in
northwestern Indonesia near an oil palm plantation and are believed to
have been poisoned by villagers, a conservationist said Thursday.
The carcasses of the protected giant animals were in a forest 560 miles
(900 kilometers) from the capital, Jakarta, said Eddy Santoso, head of
the local Conservation and Natural Resources Agency. The forest land has
been rented by the government to local farmers for commercial purposes.
The latest elephant carcass was discovered partly burnt Thursday, making
it difficult to determine whether it was male or female, Santoso said.
He said it was apparently burned with used tires.
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On Monday the decaying carcass of a six-year-old female elephant was
discovered near two other dead females found last Thursday.
Just 3,000 Sumatran elephants remain, some of them in the forest in Riau
province. Parts of the forest were converted into oil palm plantations
managed by villagers with the assistance of the state-owned plantation
company Perkebunan Nusantara.
Santoso said he suspects the elephants were poisoned by villagers
running a plantation for oil palms, which are used to make palm oil, in
an adjoining forest.
Elephants, confronted by dwindling jungle, sometimes run amok in
farmland or villages, trampling crops and killing humans.
"Maybe the villagers were worried the wild elephants would attack their
plantations," Santoso said. "They probably scattered poison there."
Last month, conservationists came upon two giant males that had been
poisoned with cyanide-laced pineapples in the same area, with their
tusks removed.
Police and the agency were investigating the latest case.
Indonesia's endangered elephants, tigers, rhinos and orangutans are
increasingly threatened by shrinking jungle habitat, which is cut and
burned to make way for plantations or sold as lumber.
Palm fruit is pressed to make palm oil, used in cosmetics, food and
increasingly for clean-burning fuel. The profitable commodity is one of
Indonesia's leading export products and a billion-dollar industry.