Modern Deaths By Elephant
No nation currently uses execution by elephant as a punishment; however, accidental deaths by elephant still occur. These fall into three major types:
- Wild elephants: Death by elephant is still common in parts of Africa and South Asia where humans and elephants co-exist: in Sri Lanka alone, 50–100 people are killed annually in clashes between humans and wild elephants.
- Domestic elephants: While working as a police officer for the British colonial government in Burma in 1926, George Orwell was forced to deal with an incident in which a domestic elephant went "musth" and killed a man by stepping on him. Orwell describes the incident in his famous essay "Shooting an Elephant", noting that "The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit."
- Captive elephants: Being crushed by captive elephants is also a major occupational hazard for elephant keepers in zoos and circuses; since the 1990s, this has led some such facilities to replace free contact between elephants and keepers with "protected contact" where keepers remain outside the elephant enclosure.
Read more about this topic: Execution By Elephant
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