Wild elephants teased in Bengal to provoke a chase for YouTube views Hindustan Times Jul 19, 2024 See link <https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/wild-elephants-teased-in-bengal-to-provoke-a-chase-for-youtube-views-101721395487146.html> for photo. KOLKATA: This is what the video shows: some young men walking on a jungle path (one of them is providing the commentary); they spot an elephant and walk close to it till it charges at them, trumpeting; they run till the elephant stops chasing them. “So, you can all see how it (the elephant) made us run. It was a long charge. Watch the video till the last, as we walk on the forest trail,” says the commentary. The video, now four days old, was shot on a jungle tract in West Bengal’s Jhargram district and focuses attention on another insidious offshoot of the content creation epidemic that has taken root around the world. The YouTube channel it has been uploaded on seems to belong to a niche genre -- elephant chases. At least two such channels have come up on YouTube since August 2023 in which young men approach, tease, and are then chased by wild elephants in the forests of Jharkhand and West Bengal. One channel is named “Jangal Mahal Elephant Gang”, another is named “Pukuria Elephant Gang”. The “Jangal Mahal Elephant Gang” channel was created in August 2023 and has uploaded 105 such videos. It has around 27,000 subscribers. Pukuria Elephant Gang was also created in August 2023 and has uploaded 198 videos. “Friends you will get videos of elephant attacks and other videos related to elephants on my YouTube channel and Facebook,” the creator of Pukuria Elephant Gang writes in the introduction. In one such video, uploaded a month ago, a man can be seen following an elephant in Jhargram and making the video. In another, a man can be seen approaching dangerously close to an elephant herd where there are several calves. The enraged elephants can be seen resorting to mock charges to chase him off. The videos were mostly shot in Jhargram district in south Bengal and the neighbouring state of Jharkhand where man-elephant conflict claims dozens of lives every year. Odisha with 322 human deaths between April 2019 to March 2022 accounted for the highest number of deaths, Jharkhand with 291 deaths came second followed by West Bengal with 240 deaths. South Bengal has around 194 elephants and Jharkhand has around 679 elephants. In 2023, the Union environment and forest ministry, in a report, identified at least 150 elephant corridors across India. While there are 11 corridors in south Bengal, two are inter-state ones shared with Jharkhand. A senior official of the West Bengal forest department said that the channels have already come under their scanner and legal action is being taken. “We are aware of it. Legal action is being taken. Cyber crime wing of police is being contacted to take down the channel,” said the official who asked not to be named. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/wild-elephants-teased-in-bengal-to-provoke-a-chase-for-youtube-views-101721395487146.html