Six elephants die trying to save each other from waterfall

Park officials find elephant calf who was around three-years-old drowned in waterfall

Six elephants have died after falling down an infamously dangerous waterfall while attempting to a save a baby elephant in Thailand.

Workers heard elephant calls from Samor Poon creek near Haew Narok waterfall – which has been nicknamed Ravine of Hell – in Khao Yai National Park in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The park officials found an elephant calf who was around three-years-old drowned in the waterfall and two male elephants standing directly above on the crag’s edge. The bodies of the five other drowned elephants were found close by.

Edwin Wiek, who set up Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand, said one of the surviving elephants was the mother of the deceased baby elephant.

The leading animal rights campaigner, founder of Thailand’s first wildlife hospital, tweeted: “Currently rangers are looking for ways to rescue two surviving elephants, one of them the mother of a calf that drowned.”

He told the BBC that elephants were highly reliant on members of their herd and the two living elephants – which are now being closely supervised – could subsequently struggle to stay alive without them.

Mr Wiek said: “It’s like losing half your family”.

Eight elephants also died after falling into the waterfall, which people have been barred from entering since the recent accident, in 1992.

Khao Yai is one of the few remaining spots in the southeast Asian country where wild elephants – Thailand’s national animal – are still alive. Around 300 wild elephants are thought to be living there.

The saga comes after six baby elephants who were trapped in a mud hole and split up from their parents were rescued in northeastern Thailand earlier in the year.

Elephants in Thailand are known for ransacking farmers’ land for food and have a particular penchant for sugar cane.

More than half of Thailand’s 7,000 elephants currently live in captivity. This has been the case since virtually of the commercial logging that had long used elephants was shelved at the end of the 1980’s.