Elephant Autopsy

I was on a weekend trip to my land at Bommalapura, fringes of Nagarhole National Park, HD Kote. Myself & my friend Ashok's family left Bangalore early morning & reached our land, its about 3& a half hours drive from Bangalore. We planned to visit Nagarhole for a safari & meanwhile we have a machan(wooden platform) built on a live huge bamboo tree we all climbed up, from top the view will be great, especially after dark if we sit on the top without making noise you can see elephants walking down, thats an amazing experience one can feel, we rested for some time.

Then we left the farm around 2pm after our lunch, on the way while driving to NNP we came across a village called Metikuppe, before the village we noticed villagers gathered in a group, we have Mr.Mahadev swamy a friend in the same village, we met him & asked about it then came to know a female elephant died previous night in a private paddy field next to the tank bund. We also stopped & took a look & went off to NNP. Next day we had to pass on the same route & the elephant was there only, actually as per the forest rules it should be examined (autopsy) & burried or burnt. Then we pressurised the forest dept. to carry on the autopsy & burry the elephant before it rots & spreads other disease. Finally they came with a team of vet.. doc & started, the procedure is like take all the parts of the body & send to their lab to find out the cause of the death.

So they started one by one, oh god it was so terrible to see live but it was a life time chance to know about elephant autopsy, first they cut open the stomach area & removed the intestine & then was a shocking scene the dead elephant was expecting a baby & even the baby elephant had died inside. They took the baby out from the dead elephant oh god it was too disturbing & sad to see that tiny cute dead baby elephant, my friend Ashok was upset whole day seeing that baby. Anybody as a human being would have been disturbed.

They started taking out every parts of the elephant body one by one like heart, Liver etc., we saw a person going inside the elephant & getting the parts, the tuff job for the forest staff was the elephant had died in the paddy field so water logging was there. It was extremely difficult to operate on elephant, but they could manage. finally they finished the autopsy & all the parts were sent in a jeep to the lab for further investigation.


for more images please click the link : http://www.flickr.com/photos/12915728@N00/sets/72157608815058459/

It was sad & disturbed week-end for us but we learn't lot.