A woman in Thailand had a surprise visitor in her home in the middle of the night.
It was a wild Asian elephant searching for food.
“We were sleeping and woke up by a sound inside our kitchen,” said Ratchadawan Puengprasoppon in a report on CNN.
“So we rushed downstairs and saw this elephant poked its head into our kitchen where the wall was broken,” she added.
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This was not the first time an elephant visited her house. In fact, her wall has a hole after another elephant smashed it last month.
She said that she has yet to repair the wall’s damage when another elephant visited her.
Ratchadawan posted videos showing the elephant extending its trunk to rifle through cupboards and drawers. The animal even picked up what appears to be a plastic bag and placed it inside its mouth.
“I have seen elephants roaming around our town looking for food since I was young. But this is the first time they actually damaged my house,” she said.
Unfortunately, she has no food stocks when the elephant visited her that night.
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“Elephants are herbivores so they need minerals from salty food, which is essential for their bodies. They would try to find any minerals, and we have educated local residents,” the Department of National Park, Wildlife and Plant Conservation said in a Facebook post.
The woman’s house also became a target since it’s located near the entrace of the national park where elephants live.
Elephant-human conflict has been on the rise since the animals’ natural habitat continues to shrink as human settlements expand.
“Although roughly half of the geographic range of elephant habitat in Thailand is considered suitable for long-term elephant conservation, much of this area is threatened by agriculture, roads and other development resulting in fragmentation and increased,” a 2018 Thailand study cited in the CNN report. (TDT)
