Nearly 40 Asiatic wild elephants went to a village Chandan Nukat in Gauhati, India desperately looking for food. After some rampage in the town, some manage to find rice beer, which farmers fermented and kept in plastic and tin drums in their huts. It's a smell that they're familiar with, it is commonly brewed by tribal communities and they've tasted it before. But this time, they had too much of it, got drunk, and in an insanity move uprooted a utility pole carrying power lines. They got themselves entangled in the live wires that ran loose as the posts were uprooted and six of them were electrocuted!

The north-east of India accounts for the world's largest concentration of wild Asiatic elephants, with the states of Assam and Meghalaya alone estimated to have 7,000 of them. While it's great to have such a huge number of elephants, but the increasing conflict between man and elephants following the shrinkage in their habitat due to the growing human population is a nightmare to the locals. Satellite imagery by the National Remote Sensing Agency, a federal body, shows that as much as 280,000 hectares of thick forests in Assam have been cleared by human encroachment between 1996 and 2000.

Wild elephants have killed more than 600 people in Assam in the past 16 years. Villagers have also been killing elephants with poison. Nineteen wild elephants were killed in 2001 after feasting on standing crops and demolishing several homes in Assams Sonitpur district, 180 kilometres north of Gauhati, the capital of Assam.

Source : www.msnbc.msn.com
Thanks to Dan Meyer for bringing this story to my attention