Animal ‘ celebrities’ melt people’s hearts

▶ Stray elephant may be going through rebellious period: biologists

There is no sign that China’s nationwide elephant fever is going away soon, as a male elephant, which recently left the herd and wandered alone in an opposite direction, has become a new sparking point on social media.

The wandering wild Asian elephants in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province are still on the road, two months after leaving their original habitat Xishuangbanna and deciding to start the longest journey in the species’ history. Eating corn, gnawing sugar cane, visiting houses, taking baths… they seem to be enjoying themselves so much that they don’t even want to go home.

The further northward they travel, the more followers they have on social media. As of Tuesday tens of millions of netizens, most likely including unsmiling middle- aged men, said they would like to just watch them sleep for a whole day, especially after a “black sheep” came out.

On June 7, one male elephant left the herd and began to wander alone in an opposite direction.

“After a male elephant is 6 years old, he will often leave the herd to go out and play, and the time of this departure will become longer and longer,” Shen Qingzhong, an official at a local nature reserve, said.

Zhang Li, a field wildlife biologist and professor on mammal conservation at Beijing Normal University, pointed out that it is likely that the male elephant left because it reached sexual maturity and thus left the herd to seek a mate.

“But since there is neither a suitable habitat nor other elephant herds nearby where mates can be found, it is expected that the elephant may still return to the larger group,” Zhang told the Global Times

The elephant herd has stayed near Yimen for a week. During the day, the elephants sleep in the dense forest in the mountains. At night, they go down to the mountain to feed, and traces of the herd passing through the village at the bottom of the mountain are seen in several places.

The local nature reserve official said that the elephants stayed in Yimen probably because it is in a river valley with a hotter climate, and there are also many crops for elephants to eat such as plantain and sugar cane, making the herd reluctant to leave.

A local official surnamed Shen recently said that the government has recently provided the elephant herd with a large amount of food. “This is not to change the elephants’ food habits, but to keep them from going to villagers’ homes for food and creating human- elephant conflicts.”

Starting from their original habitat, the Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve in Yunnan’s southernmost prefecture, on April 16, the elephants have wandered more than 600 kilometers northward. It’s the furthest that a herd of wild elephants from Xishuangbanna has ever travelled from its original habitat.