A 22-year-old female elephant and its one-and-a-half-year-old calf were trapped in a 20-feet-deep pit and rescued the next day in a forest near Vadattupara in Kothamangalam, India on July 26, according to The Times of India.
"Around 7pm, the calf and the female elephant were rescued from the pit. The calf came out first followed by the female elephant," forest officials told Times of India. "As the spot was one of the deeper regions of the forest, it was hard to bring in men and materials for the rescue operation."
Officials had to enter the area with bamboo rafts, reported The Hindu, and it took them an entire day to help the animals up from the deep trap. Officials created a soft ramp with leaves and mud to help the elephants walk out of the trap.
The pit was part of a series of traps dug by the Forest Department to catch elephants nearly 30 years ago, reported The New Indian Express. A forest official told Times of India that the practice had been stopped since, but steps have not been taken to fill the traps.
The pits were dug around 30 years ago to trap the elephants. Though the government had banned this practice, no steps have been taken to fill the pits. There are several more pits in the forests and nobody knows where they are situated.
According to The Hindu, V. K. Venkitachalam, secretary of the Heritage Animal Task Force demanded that the traps were dangerous to wildlife and needed to be leveled and demanded action against those who didn't see to this matter urgently.
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