Last week, I was watching a program on the Discovery channel about the Nagarhole national park in Karnataka. It showed how different animals there cope with the change of seasons. While following a herd of wild elephants, the narrator drew the viewers’ attention to a blind female elephant with her little one. He commented that it looked like female was shot when she entered a plantation, thus separating the two from their herd and that the going was likely to get pretty tough for both of them.

When the season changed to summer and dry parched land, the camera captured the two again – fresh green grass was hard to come by so the mother was starving and the baby, who was entirely dependent on his mom’s milk, looked positively malnourished. It hurt to see the baby suffer like that.

Inevitably, the show then captured the arrival of the monsoon and the change in the look of the land. But there was no mention of the baby elephant and its mother. The show simply left the viewers wondering whether they survived or not.

I just hope that they did. :-( L