ab initio , it sounds like something you might see in a terrible Asian circus , but you ’ll be relieved to learn that the video that has emerged ofa smoke - respiration elephantwas actually filmed in the wilderness , and might well be innate behavior for the pachyderm .
The snip of the " smoking " Asian elephant was filmed in Nagarahole National Park , southwestern India , by a guy called Vinay Kumar who works for the environmental organization , Wildlife Conservation Society ( WCS ) . On a trip through the parkland – which teems with World Tamil Association , bear , and wild dogs – to check television camera traps that have been set up to register this wealth of wildlife , Kumar and his team recorded the strange scene .
The video shows an Asiatic elephant picking through the leaf litter and eating a routine of detritus , before heavy breathing out gravid plume of smoke . The sincerely bizarre footage has stomp many of the scientists over at the WCS , although one may have a theory as to what is going on .
“ I consider the elephant may have been trying to ingest Sir Henry Joseph Wood charcoal,”explainedDr Varun Goswami , who is an elephant life scientist with WCS India . “ She appear to be plunk up pieces from the timberland storey , blow aside the ash that came along with it , and consume the residual . ”
The idea of an elephant eating charcoal might go a moment weird , but in the animate being kingdom , it is not unheard of . On the island of Zanzibar , it was come up that some group of the carmine colobus monkeys that last therefrequently chow down on charcoal , consuming up to 5 grams of the stuff and nonsense every single twenty-four hours . They would search for it in burned trees in the fields , abandon kiln , and even maraud villager ’ hearths to get their fix .
As untried scalawag were ascertain the act from their mother , and no other primates ( aside from humans ) had been run into eating charcoal before , it could simply have been a ethnic behavior spreading among reddened colobus monkey groups on parts of the island . But the fact that the radical that eat on the charcoal were producing more offspring than those that did n’t suggest at something else .
And indeed , study showed that the charcoal eating might actually be a shape of self - medication , neutralizing the large amounts of toxins that the monkey ingest due to their leaf - big dieting . This is like to what is seen in humans , with some cultures regularly eat fusain themselves , as it is known to douse up the harmful chemicals notice naturally in some food product .
So perhaps rather than some ominous effect of the forest fires , the elephant might actually be ego - medicine and it could be a far more usual behavior than is currently guess .
