Conservation of Asiatic elephants will help protect tigers too

Conservation of Asiatic elephants will help protect tigers too

Saturday September 05, 2015,

2 min Read

Efforts to conserve the Asiatic elephant will not only help conserve the natural forest land but also other animals including tigers, says wildlife photographer Rajesh Bedi. “Conserving Asiatic elephants requires a great effort. They need to be provided with huge resources of water and food to ensure their survival in the wild. In the bigger picture, such efforts to conserve these giant mammals will automatically trickle down to benefit the tigers”, he says.


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A collection of rare photographs of the Asiatic elephant by Bedi form a part of an exhibition at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. Conveying the message of “elephant extinction”, the exhibition titled “Elephant – the divine mystery”, consists of unique clicks of groups of tuskers in their wild habitat.

“The collection of photographs here capture these animals in all their moods. The government is trying its best to conserve these animals through the Project Elephant launched in 1992”, Prakash Javadekar, Union Minister of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of India, said while inaugurating the exhibition last evening.

Around forty photos from Bedi’s vast collection on elephants are on display at the exhibition. Many more are soon to appear in a large format book, which will also include tales of his adventures in search of that perfect elephant photograph. “We cannot know the mind of an elephant, but these intelligent, expressive creatures share much with us. Intensely social animals, they have large brains, famously long memories and they appear to express a wide range of emotions”, says Bedi.

Image Credit: Shutterstock


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