By Thai Newsroom Reporters
A HERD OF WILD ELEPHANTS have wreaked havoc to a durian orchard in Hua Hin’s inland area where they visited uninvited and forcibly pulled down the fruit for dinner.
The wild elephants in Kaeng Krachan national park caught the wind-blown smells of ripe durian grown in the neighborhood of Pala-U village in Huay Sat Yai subdistrict of Hua Hin and rambled into the plantation twice from late evening of Tuesday until the wee hours of Wednesday, said Sunantha Pimthai, head of the subdistrict administrative organization yesterday (June 11).
While the pachyderms forcibly wrested some of the fruit from the trees to eat at the spot, hundreds of the fruit, either ripe or unripe, fell to the ground. Many were trampled upon by the nighttime intruders in effort to tear up the thorny, thick skin and use their trunk to put the yellow, smelly flesh in their mouth.
Sunantha said the rampage cost some 400,000 baht in damage for the Pala-U durian farmer who had planned to harvest the fruit and put barcode stickers on his products for sale to vendors in the next two weeks.
The subdistrict administrative organization, better known in Thai initials as Or Bor Tor, has set a plan to build strong fences to keep the wildlife from trespassing onto fruit orchards but little progress has been made so far, she admitted.
Nevertheless, Or Bor Tor will manage to pay the farmer a sum of 1,600 baht in compensation for each durian tree destroyed by the hungry elephants.
CAPTION:
Top: A hungry wild elephant looking for something to eat. Photo: Chris Eason (CC BY 2.0)
One Reply to “Hungry elephants raid durian orchard in Hua Hin”