Official: 3 rare elephants poisoned in Indonesia
PEKANBARU, Indonesia (AP) — Three rare Sumatran elephants were found dead in northwestern Indonesia near an oil palm plantation and are believed to have been poisoned by villagers, a conservationist said Thursday.
The carcasses of the protected giant animals were in a forest 560 miles (900 kilometers) from the capital, Jakarta, said Eddy Santoso, head of the local Conservation and Natural Resources Agency. The forest land has been rented by the government to local farmers for commercial purposes.
The decaying carcass of a six-year-old female elephant was discovered Monday near two other dead females found last Thursday.
Santoso said he suspects the elephants were poisoned by villagers running a plantation for oil palms, which are used to make palm oil, in an adjoining forest.
Elephants, confronted by dwindling jungle, sometimes run amok in farmland or villages, trampling crops and killing humans.
"Maybe the villagers were worried the wild elephants would attack their plantations," he said. "They probably scattered poison there."
Last month, conservationists came upon two giant males that had been poisoned with cyanide-laced pineapples in the same area, with their tusks removed.
Police were investigating the latest case in coordination with the agency.
Part of the forest in Riau province — where some of just 3,000 remaining Sumatran elephants live — were converted into oil palm plantations managed by the locals with the assistance of the state-owned plantation company Perkebunan Nusantara.
Indonesia's endangered elephants, tigers, rhinos and orangutans are increasingly threatened by shrinking jungle habitat, which is cut and burned to make way for plantations or sold as lumber.
Palm fruit is pressed to make palm oil, used in cosmetics, food and increasingly for clean-burning fuel. The profitable commodity is one of Indonesia's leading export products and a billion-dollar industry.
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