Shut ‘illegal’ brick kilns on migratory track of jumbos in Thadagam: PIL

When the PIL petition by S Muralidharan of INCARE, an organisation for animal welfare activities, came up for hearing on Thursday, a division bench of Justices S Manikumar and Subramonium Prasad tagged it with another petition relating to wild elephant Chinnathambi, to be heard on February 11.

The other petition has sought a direction to prevent authorities from capturing, taming, tranquilising or harming Chinnathambi, which was translocated from the outskirts of Coimbatore to Varagaliar.

In the present PIL, the petitioner submitted that Thadagam Valley in Coimbatore forest division was home to wild life species including Royal Bengal Tigers and the Asian elephants and has in the past two decades witnessed mushrooming of brick kilns. Noting that the valley was an elephant habitat, the petitioner said the brick kilns have fractured the land leading to the drying up of Sanganur canal and effectively blocking the routine migratory path of pachyderms.

The jumbos are being forced out of their traditional foraging range or migratory route in the valley, he claimed and sought a direction to close down the brick kilns.

Animal rights body jumps to elephant’s defence: Days after the Madras High Court advised authorities not to put a roaming jumbo to any discomfort, an animal rights body on Thursday urged the state government to keep Chinnathambi in the tusker’s natural forest home. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India also advised the government to adopt only humane and scientific methods to protect crops and villages or to translocate the animal to another forested area, if necessary. PETA said compassionate methods such as planting chillies around farm perimeters can be adopted while dealing with human-elephant conflict, citing the example of farmers in Africa dealing with such problems. The animal rights body also urged the government to incorporate adequate town planning as an anecdote to the increasing encounters between elephants and humans.