elephants: all the rage.

I've only recently discovered just how ruthless elephants could be. I once thought they gentle giants, probably spurred on from my good experiences with them in Thailand. But as it turns out 'elephant rage' is extremely common in all elephants and according to Wikipedia:

In the Indian state of Jharkhand, 300 people were killed by elephants between 2000 and 2004, and in Assam, 239 people have been killed by elephants since 2001.In India, elephants kill up to 200 humans every year, and in Sri Lanka around 50 per year.

One famous case was of Tyke the elephant. In August 1994, Tyke killed her trainer and "gored" her groomer in front of a crowd of hundreds in Honolulu before running out of the arena and running rampant around the streets of Kakaako for half an hour before being shot at 86 times and dying.

This can probably be attributed to the circus elephant being treated extremely badly, as they are smart creatures and as such I would assume they can be spiteful. The moral of the story is; treat your elephant kind, and you won't get crushed to death. It took me a while to actually find an article on a famous elephant that hadn't killed someone. So keep it in mind.

Here's some adorable elephants to wrap things up.