15-foot-long Cobra rescued from factory in Tamil Nadu's Tenkasi
Nov 16, 2023
Chennai (Tamil Nadu) [India], November 17 : Tamil Nadu Forest Department on Thursday rescued a 15-foot-long male cobra from a private factory in the Kadayam municipality of Tenkasi district.
The incident took place near Govindaperi.
Panic gripped the area after the cobra was spotted.
Locals of the area informed the forest department officials. Upon receiving the information, a team reached the spot and rescued the cobra.
Officials had been monitoring the wild elephants in the Gudalur and Pandalur areas of Nilgiri district as they increasingly entered human habitats and caused destruction to properties and standing crops in the areas.
Residents of Cherangode, Cherambadi, Athichal, and other areas faced elephant menace as wild jumbos entered agricultural and residential areas.
The human-wild elephant conflict has been a persistent problem in the Gudalur forest division in the district.
An expert committee formed by the state government in 2022 made a number of recommendations to minimise human-elephant interactions in the Gudalur forest division. The intensification of individual monitoring of elephants that are known to be drawn towards human settlements is one of the recommendations of the committee.
The expert committee had recommended that all elephants be radio-collared to track them easily and to give information about their movement to local communities. Another recommendation is the spatial zonation of areas into elephant conservation areas, human-elephant co-existence areas, and elephant exclusion areas.
The Asian elephant, being a wide-ranging species, needs expansive resources for its survival and thus comes into close confrontation with people, often resulting in human-elephant conflict (HEC) in the form of crop and property damages, human injuries and deaths, and retaliatory killings of the elephants.