The tragedy below is not unique to India or to elephants. In Australia exactly the same thing is happening to kangaroos, wombats, quolls, and all the other animals and their forests - as you can read most days on candobetter.org 
In Viewpoint, Amirtharaj Christy Williams, in “Where should the elephants go?” writes,
“The country, the people, the language or the retribution are different, but the cause for elephant-human conflict remains the same - humans displacing elephants from their natural habitat. …”
She says that, “In India, Nepal and Bangladesh, humans encroach on elephant habitats, which are further fragmented by roads, canals, dams, mines.”
She explains that elephants need about 200 sq km of ‘forest home range’, and that it is when, ‘… humans move into forested habitats, elephant-human conflicts are born.”
She describes how those invading elephant habitat use the cruelest of methods, such as “throwing burning tyres, shooting at the beasts with sharpened nails, even by laying out foods laced with killer pesticides.”
Infrastructure moguls and their government minions cause inexcusable cruelty
But those examples of human depravity are only symptoms of the cause, which is the destruction of the elephants’ homelands, often with the help of “short-sighted government officials who encourage large areas to be set aside for monoculture cash-crop plantations or infrastructural and development projects.”
Corrupt officials and academics, politicians, industrialists, and contractors
Williams' comments indicate that governments are responsible for the failure to protect these animals’ habitats, due to their foolish and naïve decisions made in response to big-business propaganda.
“In India, we have seen this with the collusion of corrupt officials and academics writing fake Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) designed to serve the interest of a small group of politicians, industrialists or contractors who profit from the untruths.”
She adds that many apparently expert plans to manage development are drawn up by people who do not have knowledge of elephant behaviour and ecology. (We see the same in Australia with people 'managing' kangaroos.)
"The brunt of the resulting conflict is borne by local communities and the beleaguered giants who stand no chance against the destructive power of humans."
The real monsters
"Our power to transform things is so much greater than our power to understand them. In this way we are the same as the cattle that unknowingly destroy the banks of rivers with their hard hoofs."
(Jill Quirk, Victorian President of Sustainable Population Australia)
There is more to Williams' article but I have cut it out in order to report the news of the elephants without, for once, making people choose between people and elephants in their imaginations. This is no choice. The growth-economics system is what forces people off their land where they used to grow food for free and into a spiral of population growth simply to survive on tiny wages so that employers might profit from industries built on stolen land.
We have to stand up for the elephants and we have to stand up for the people so that their land may not be ceded by their governments to big business in India, Australia, the US, Canada, or anywhere else.
India or Australia; different places, same sh**
As I said in the beginning of this article about Williams's article, the tragedy below is not unique to India or to elephants. In Australia (a supposedly scientifically and ecologically sophisticated first world country), exactly the same thing is happening to kangaroos, wombats, quolls, and all the other animals and their forests. In Australia, if the engineered rapid population growth fuels demands for land used by kangaroos, the kangaroos will be shot or simply forced out with no provision made and if no critic notices then the perpetrators get away with this. The government and even the developers may talk about poor people who need houses, but it is the government and the developers who are driving up the cost of land for housing. And they know it. That is why it is a crime worthy of trial and punishment.
Forests are clear felled without even requisite studies of the areas to ascertain the numbers, rarity or range of resident wild life. No provision is made for the future of the wild life whose forest falls around them- if they're not killed outright by the operation, they die soon after retreating to another animal's territory
Yet Australians are not yet as densely populated as Indians - not in humans and not in other fauna. They never will be. Australia is biophysically much poorer than India. That is the reason that humans and other animal populations here are less dense in most parts of Australia, but very dense where there is comparative fertility.
The problem of cruelty and depravity against nature's many beautiful and contrasting faces is caused by overpopulation and development in both cases, and it is politically induced by big business lobbying. Both Indians and Australians have lost effective self-government to global corporations.
Colonialism and economic growthism
The problem is a product of colonialism and economic growthism, in India and Australia. Rural commodities industries, property developers and other corporate interests which have ownership of physical assets want to earn more than is reasonable or fair in a finite system. A malignant global media is their mouthpiece. They therefore convince governments to break-down local self-government, then to force up population growth. This drives up the cost of land and water, hence the cost of living. Only big business profits. "Jobs, jobs!" you will hear. Yet nomadic big business constantly finds excuses to downsize employment. In good times and in bad times. Growth, smart or foolish somehow amounts to the same thing; the earth is always poorer; the rich are always richer; and democracy is always more unreachable.
This modis operandi is common to all colonised countries which have inherited the British land-tenure system and growth economics. It happens in Australia, it happens in India.
I urge readers (people) not to be confused by the question of rights of disempowered poor people and wild life at the jungle's edge, but to rise up against the real monsters, the corporations and the shareholder system, and the governments and media which promote and portray this exploitative, sick system as inevitable. We must do battle against the merchants of growth instead of the other creatures who share our planet. The growth-merchants should be put on trial for crimes against nature and locked away in zoos.
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