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Elephants outsmarting humans on Indonesia's Sumatra A herd of wild elephants on Indonesia's Sumatra has repeatedly outsmarted efforts to stop them stealing crops, wising up to attempts to chase them off with burning torches, a report said Monday. The head of Way Kambas natural reserve in Lampung province, Hudiono, told the state-run Antara news agency that a herd of 25 to 30 elephants had been nightly roaming out of the reserve to raid crops since Thursday. The elephants, previously only occasional visitors, have managed to clamber over earthen embankments built as an obstacle between the reserve and the fields by using their trunks to hold onto each other, he reportedly said. An electrified wire fence was also no match for the canny beasts, he told the agency, saying they had felled it using tree trunks. Even blazing torches no longer scare the night-time raiders. "This herd were once afraid of torches and could be herded out this way. But now they cannot be (herded out) this way again," Hudiono said. "In the rainy season such as now, people usually plant alternative crops and perhaps this herd of elephants thinks this is instant food," he added. Such crops include peanuts, taro and yams. Conflicts between wild animals and humans have long been on the rise on Sumatra, where jungle habitat is being increasingly taken over by encroaching settlements, plantations and industrial estates. Only about 350 to 430 wild elephants remained on the island in 2003, according to environmental group WWF.
Dog hospitalised for being over the limit A dog was admitted to a veterinary clinic in Austria at the weekend, barely able to stand on his own four paws and reeking "like a beer hall," a newspaper reported on Monday. Dingo, a three-year-old labrador weighing 40 kilogrammes (88 pounds), was a pitiful sight when his owner, a hunter, brought him in to the surgery in the Salzkammergut region, the Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten quoted vet Karl Hofbauer as saying. "The dog had dreadful wind and diarrhea, and was vomiting a lot," Hofbauer said. "When I got him up on the table, it smelt like a distillery." Tests indicated that the dog had a blood alcohol content of 1.6 milligrams per 100 millilitres. But that was not the result of Dingo having one drink too many, the owner insisted. The hungry pooch had stolen and secretly devoured half a kilogramme of fresh yeast dough from the kitchen. Alcohol had formed inside his stomach as a result of the fermentation process, leaving poor old Dingo stone drunk. "Nasty-minded people said that we hunters are often drunk. With me, it's my dog," joked the owner.
