Kerala's rogue elephant trouble far from over as radio collar fails

Thiruvananthapuram, May 3 The residents in and around Chinnakanal in Idukki district, who had been tormented by Kerala's one of wildest elephants 'Arikomban', are again worried, as on Wednesday, the officials said that radio signals have not been received for hours now.

'Arikomban' was captured, radio collared and sent to deep forest on Saturday.

According to the officials, the last signal was received on Tuesday afternoon.

The eight kg radio collar that was put on the neck of the elephant soon after being captured, is tuned to send signals every hour, but the forest officials said that the last signal was received was at 2 p.m on Tuesday.

And the location of Arikomban at that time was around 10 kms from where it was captured.

On Saturday, after being captured it was taken and let off around 21 kms from the spot from where it was taken into custody after seven doses of tranquilisers.

The forest department is now contacting the company, which has supplied the radio collar, and according to experts at times the connection can get aborted due to the location and probably bad weather too, but they are now trying to track Arikomban using a VHF antenna.

Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor