The Sri Lankan military was setting light to the jungle, to clear away possible hiding places for Tamil Tiger ambushes. A herd of elephants was watching from a distance as the soldiers set fire to their habitat, to the leaves that were their food. The elephant was not the aggressor here: man was.Now new research has begun to emerge, suggesting that the incidence of elephant attacks on humans is growing because elephants are suffering severe trauma as a result of seeing so many of their kin killed by humans, according to a report in the New York Times Magazine.Charles Siebert describes how male elephants have begun raping and killing rhinoceroses in South Africa. Military convoys were coming under regular attack on the road, and it wasn’t a good place to be, but we weren’t expecting the huge bull elephant who suddenly came out of the foliage and blocked our path. The villagers told us the elephant herd had stood patiently by while a single male wreaked all this destruction on his own And they were in no doubt about why he did it.

The road had cut through the elephants’ traditional migration route. They were making a new route, and were not happy at finding the village in the way.Then there was the night in Sri Lanka, another nerve- racking drive, on the way back from interviewing Tamil Tiger rebels. As we drew closer, we saw what it was: a baby elephant trying to cross the road, trapped between the headlights of cars coming from both directions If we hadn’t slowed down, we would have killed it. And then, as our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we saw them all around us, some of their eyes glinting where they caught the lights from the cars: a entire herd of wild elephants on either side of the road, waiting patiently to cross.A couple of days later I visited a village near by that had been demolished by a herd of elephants It looked like an earthquake had hit it. It wasn’t just the traditional flimsy bamboo huts that had suffered Twenty-foot palm trees had been uprooted from the ground. The Oxford team has been working on the preservation of the Ethiopian wolf for 20 years and the scientists work closely with local people and the government.Karen Laurenson, a member of the research team from Edinburgh University, said: “The vaccination of wildlife, when appropriate and strategically used, is a safe, direct and effective method of reducing extinction threats.”It is hoped that the further development of oral rabies vaccines that can be given in food will in future make it easier to vaccinate the remote wolf populations.. Almost everyone who has been on holiday to India or Sri Lanka has a story about their encounter with an elephant: getting stuck in a traffic jam behind one in Delhi perhaps, riding on an elephant in Rajasthan, or being blessed by the temple elephants of Tamil Nadu.

But my own encounters with the elephants of the subcontinent have been rather more unsettling. The first time I saw a wild elephant was on a remote jungle road in West Bengal in the dead of night. It was a bad stretch of road, known to be frequented by bandits and separatist militants. We shouldn’t have been out there so late at night, and we were going too fast in our hurry to get back to civilisation.
Suddenly we noticed something blocking the road ahead. There was another car coming in the opposite direction, and all we could see was the silhouette picked out between the lights. It was about the size of a cow, but the shape was all wrong.The driver blew the horn, but the shape didn’t move Nervously, he began to slow. “We’ve looked at vaccination studies that don’t prevent all outbreaks, but do reduce the chance of really big outbreaks – ones that could push an endangered population over the extinction threshold.”In the study, 80 wolves were captured and vaccinated.

They formed part of the largest breedinggroup of 350 wolves in the Bale Mountains, in the south-east Ethiopian highlands. Dr Sillero-Zubiri said that the wolf still faces long-term threats from climate change and habitat loss, which is driving the remaining populations to higher altitudes. “Ethiopian wolves are the rarest carnivores in the world, restricted to a few mountain enclaves in the Ethiopian highlands,” said Claudio Sillero-Zubiri, of Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit.The wolf is a specialist carnivore feeding on the rodents that live in the high alpine pastures. There are six breeding populations living in the Ethiopian highlands and all of them are susceptible to infections introduced by the domestic dogs of local shepherds. “Canid diseases, such as rabies and distemper transmitted from domestic dogs, pose the most immediate threat to their persistence, and targeted vaccination intervention presents a useful tool to protect the remaining small wolf populations from extinction,” Dr Sillero-Zubiri said.Ethiopian wolves live in some of most inaccessible mountain enclaves of the world and it is difficult to reach some of the remoter packs and capture all their members, he said. As a result it was thought that it would be impossible to carry out the sort of blanket vaccination that was deemed necessary for an effective campaign against the rabies virus.But the study showed that instead of vaccinating almost every animal, the scientists could get away with inoculating just 30 per cent of the population under the greatest threat of coming into contact with domestic dogs. One of the rarest animals in the world might be saved from imminent extinction with the help of a rabies vaccine targeted at the most vulnerable members of the species.

There are no more than about 500 Ethiopian wolves left alive and up to three-quarters of the population were wiped out in a rabies outbreak in 2003. This led scientists to experiment with a targeted vaccination campaign that they believe could save the species from dying out completely in any future rabies outbreaks.
A computer model of the vaccination following the 2003 epidemic suggests that the campaign has worked and that the short-term future of the wolf now looks more secure, according to a study published in the journal Nature. But the Pyongyang regime has been encouraged in its nuclear ambitions by the very nations that are clamouring to criticise the test most loudly: the nuclear states of Britain and the US.By maintaining their nuclear arsenals and refusing to implement the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s requirements to disarm, Blair and Bush have weakened the NPT significantly, to the point where North Korea was able to simply walk away from it and develop its nuclear weapons beyond the reach of international law. That the UK and US are now leading international criticism of North Korea is hypocrisy of the worst kind – nuclear hypocrisy which could be responsible for hastening the deaths of millions.The way to defuse North Korea’s ambition to equip its military with nuclear arms is for the UK, US and other nuclear states to reinvigorate international non-proliferation law by starting to dismantle their own nuclear arsenals, as a first step to banishing hypocrisy from international efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In the meantime, negotiations and condemnation should be left to those states that have demonstrated their respect for international law and desire to see a nuclear-weapons free world.DR CAROLINE LUCAS MEP(GREEN, SOUTH-EAST ENGLAND), EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, BRUSSELS Blaming Americans won’t save climate Sir: Your front page “Supersize Nation” (11 October) must be offensive to US citizens, and totally misses the point. Every year 25 million trees go into the production of lavatory paper, paper towels, napkins, facial tissues and handkerchiefs for EU consumers.. “Customers have a role to play in creating demand for recycled tissues and lavatory tissue,” said Ms Richards.