22 people killed by one rampaging elephant in Jharkand
RANCHI, Jharkhand, India; GABORONE, Botswana––“Rogue elephant kills two more in Jharkhand, toll reaches 22 in nine days,” bannered Mukesh Ranjan for the New Indian Express on January 9, 2025.
This came just 48 hours after Shashi Singh of The Statesman, an Indian national newspaper published since 1818, shocked the nation by reporting that,
“At least 17 people have been killed and more than 10 injured in a series of elephant attacks across forest villages of the West Singhbhum district over the past week.”
Just one male elephant is believed to be responsible for the human deaths, including 12 attacks on remote villages in only seven days, “striking at night and retreating into dense forest cover by day,” Singh wrote.
Six people including four children were stomped to death by the rampaging elephant on the night of January 6, 2025, in the most deadly rampage yet.
“Fear now defines daily life”
“Villagers, most of them from tribal communities living along traditional elephant corridors, say fear now defines daily life,” Singh continued.
“Families are staying awake through the night, lighting fires and keeping vigil to protect their homes. Many say they no longer feel safe even indoors, given the fragility of mud huts and the speed of the attacks.
“Official data highlight the scale of the problem,” Singh resumed. “Jharkhand has recorded around 1,270 human deaths due to elephant attacks over the past 18 years, while nearly 150 elephants have also died in conflict-related incidents.
“The state is home to an estimated 550 to 600 elephants, increasingly coming into contact with humans as forest corridors shrink and settlements expand.”
But are the attacks really the work of just one elephant?
Amit Bhelari of The Hindu, the largest Indian national newspaper, reported on January 9, 2026 that according to forest divisional officer Aditya Narayan there is some question as to whether only one elephant is responsible for all of the recent attacks on humans, partly because villagers disagree about whether the elephant has both tusks or only one.
“We are camping in the forest and all efforts are being made to identify and tranquilize the elephant,” Narayan said. “However, we are not sure how many rogue elephants are there. We are also not sure whether the elephant has come from Odisha or from the forest of Chaibasa.”
(Wildlife SOS photo)
No clamor in India for trophy hunting
The killer elephant may be shot, or may be captured and sent to a sanctuary, perhaps one of the Wildlife SOS facilities or Vantara. Teams from both organizations are reportedly on the scene.
(See Vantara: billionaire-built zoo/sanctuary has conservationists in a dither and Why is Vantara hiring flacks & lawyers instead of just explaining itself?)
No one, though, appears to be clamoring for an elephant trophy hunting season.
Indian banned trophy hunting in 1973. To allow elephant trophy hunting, even through passing special legislation, would gravely offend most Jains and many Hindus.
Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, is the most popular member of the Hindu pantheon. And the legacy of elephant hunting by Islamic maharajahs and British occupiers is still much resented.
This rampaging elephant, like many before him, will be stopped somehow, perhaps by being shot.
But the elephant will not be shot for sport or––legally, anyway––for his tusks.
Jharkand vs. Botswana
Jharkhand state, India, occupies about 31,000 square miles, making it just a little bit smaller than South Carolina.
The nation of Botswana, Africa, at 224,610 square miles, is more than seven times larger, roughly the size of Texas.
While Jharkhand, human population 33 million, has fewer than 600 elephants, Botswana claims 131,000 elephants.
“About 100 people have reportedly been killed or injured by elephants in Botswana since 2010, no small number in a country of only 2.6 million,” reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation team of Stephanie March, Marty Smiley, and Matt Davis from Gabarone, the Botswanian capital city, on March 31, 2025.
(Facebook photo)
Former Botswana president suspended trophy hunting
The frequency of elephants killing humans, relative to human population, are similar in Jharkhand and Botswana, but the official responses currently could scarcely be more different.
The abundant elephants in Botswana have long drawn covetous attention from both trophy hunters and ivory poachers.
(See Elephant trophy auction covers for opening bushmeat trade and Botswana, please rethink resuming hunting! by Sebastian Mwanza.)
Then-Botswanian president Ian Khama in 2014 declared a moratorium on elephant and lion trophy hunting, “worrying it was damaging the country’s wildlife credentials in the eyes of the world,” summarized March, Smiley, and Davis.
Khama suspended trophy hunting more specifically because trophy hunting was depleting the populations of elephants and lions most accessible to non-consumptive wildlife tourism, an industry magnitudes larger in Botswana––and indeed in all of Africa––than trophy hunting ever was.
Money in well-placed pockets
Trophy hunting, however, tends to put large lump sums of money in a few well-placed pockets, while non-consumptive wildlife tourism distributes smaller sums farther and wider, creating many jobs, but making relatively few people rich.
Only five years after Ian Khama stopped elephant and lion trophy hunting, “his successor Mokgweetsi Masisi reinstated it, citing high levels of elephant-human conflict and the impact the large elephant population was having on livelihoods,” recited March, Smiley, and Davis.
(See “Ban wildlife trophy imports!” pleads former Botswana president to U.K. & U.S.)
Whose livelihoods?
That seems to be the crux of the issue. Rural communities having elephants but lacking non-consumptive wildlife tourism infrastructure tend to see only crop damage and sporadic threats to lives, homes, and vehicles from the elephants when they run amok.
Hunting money rarely reaches the villages
Trophy hunting is easily sold to those communities as a solution both to conflict with elephants and persistent rural poverty.
Yet the money rarely reaches the villages, and trophy hunting depletion of the biggest tuskers, the bulls who keep the younger elephants in line, tends to make elephant/human conflict worse––which benefits the trophy hunting industry by increasing rural demands for more elephants to be shot.
“Leungo Motlakaleso,” a farmer in the Okavango Delta region of Botswana, who calls marauding elephants “terrorists,” told March, Smiley, and Davis that “he has no idea how much money is being generated from trophy hunting in his area, and his community has never seen the benefit from it.
“We don’t even know how many elephants are supposed to be killed in our area,” Leungo Motlakaleso complained to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation team. “How would we know about the money?”
“Treated like hyena or scavengers”
Continued March, Smiley, and Davis, “He’s not the only local who feels this way. Oaitse Nawa, founder of the Elephant Protection Society, says there are only two entities that benefit from trophy hunting: “The hunter and then the government.”
Both Leungo Motlakaleso and Oaitse Nawa, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation team continued, find “deeply insulting” the claim of the trophy hunting industry that meat from elephants killed by hunters is “an important source of protein for grateful villagers.”
Said Oaitse Nawa, “Being given meat is like you are treated like hyena or scavengers. This is how black people have been treated for quite a long time. But now we are in the modern world. We need education, we need transport, we need to compete with other cultures.”
“The thud of a dropped tusk”
Updated Don Pinnock, environmental reporter for the South African newspaper Daily Maverick on December 16, 2025, “The Botswana government’s draft 2026 quota––authorising a record 430 elephant trophy hunts, the largest anywhere––has landed with the thud of a dropped tusk.
“According to leading elephant scientists Mike Chase and Scott Schlossberg,” both Ph.D. holders in wildlife management, “it is also profoundly misguided.
“The fight over elephants isn’t really about numbers,” Pinnock pointed out. “It’s about which elephants are being killed, how that destabilizes the survivors, who really benefits, and what the cost will be to Botswana’s economy and reputation.
“Trophy hunters target the same demographic poachers do––the last great big-tusked adult bulls. These ‘elders,’ as Chase and Schlossberg call them, make up less than 1% of the population, but they are disproportionately important.
“They carry the scarce genetics for large tusks. They stabilize the behavior of younger males. And female elephants choose them for breeding.”
“Tourism is built around living elephants”
Summarized Pinnock of the Chase and Schlossberg critique, “Combined hunting and poaching pressures could halve the number of older bulls and reduce the population of middle-aged bulls [in Botswana] by a quarter. That’s demographic collapse, not management.”
Pinnock went on to follow the money, noting that “Communities receive less than 7%” of the sum raised through elephant trophy hunting.
“Foreign hunters and a handful of safari operators extract the bulk of the profits,” Pinnock said.
“Meanwhile, the tourism sector built around living elephants – real, charismatic, majestic bulls with names and stories – generates $30 billion annually across Africa. Trophy hunting contributes US $140 million. One is an economic engine. The other is pocket change dressed in camouflage.”
“Policy capture”
Why, then, is the Botswanian government hellbent on picking up the “pocket change dressed in camouflage”?
“In late 2025,” Pinnock explained, “Botswana’s Ministry of Environment & Tourism signed a memorandum of understanding with Conservation Force, a U.S.-based trophy-hunting lobby group led by John Jackson III. According to the ministry’s own statements, the group has already been involved in drafting the National Elephant Management Plan, shaping the Non-Detriment Finding for elephants, and creating the Leopard Management Plan.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“This is not advisory input; it is policy capture,” Pinnock assessed. “It places a foreign hunting lobby at the center of Botswana’s wildlife policy machinery, giving it influence over how many elephants, leopards and lions can be killed each year.
“It also means those who profit from hunts are helping design the rules that govern them,” Pinnock concluded. “The fox is not just in the henhouse – the fox is drafting the henhouse blueprint.”
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“The state is home to an estimated 550 to 600 elephants, increasingly coming into contact with humans as forest corridors shrink and settlements expand.”
We may have been commanded to “be fruitful and multiply,” but it should not take a rocket scientist, when indeed the most famous rocket scientist is seemingly determined to follow that command to whatever ends, to understand that our planet and the living beings with whom we are commanded to share it cannot support the unchecked human overpopulation which is driving ALL of the present crises threatening us all.
Elephants, lions, and other species cannot limit their populations as effectively as humans can. And when humans increasingly take over their habitat, confrontations are inevitable. It is not the elephants’ or lions’ or other living beings’ fault and it is not their responsibility to give way to us. The responsibility is OURS. And we ignore it at not only their peril, but ours as well. Moving individuals or populations of other liviing beings with whom we come into conflict or find otherwise inconvenient does not, cannot and will not solve the problem. Human realization of the urgent need to practice birth control and move out of the last habitat of species with whom we share our planet will, but only if we are serious about it.
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Each and every post is informing and leaves the reader to question the morality of so many of our decisions when it comes to how to adjust, adapt or manage the interactions between our own and other species. This animal advocate is deeply grateful for your overviews.