Living Side by Side

Aside from the free-roaming elephants in the wild, India hosts another 20K of these majestic mammals in temples and nature reserves. The Hindu deity Ganesh appears with the head of an elephant. Revered for millennia, they got along well with the locals and were domesticated thousands of years ago.

That’s why the locals didn’t ignore the herd’s distress calls. And why they risked their lives to help these potentially dangerous animals; they were honoring a reverent relationship stretching over history.