Believing that luck will come to people who wear elephant-tail-hair-made jewelry, domesticated and wild elephants in the Central Highlands provinces of Dak Lak, which is famous for elephant taming, are in danger.

The body of a male elephant which had been shot to death in Dak Lak.

People in Ea Sup district, Dak Lak on June 11 reported the body of a two-tonne male elephant which had been shot to death in the local forest. The elephant was missing its head, tail and buttocks. Local forest rangers said that the elephant was around 20 years old and it was shot to death around one week earlier.

The elephant’s body was detected near Bana village, where a 40-member wild elephant herd had often come and destroyed crops in recent years.

Ea Sup district’s chairman Phan Xuan Linh said the local authorities asked relevant agencies to quickly hunt down the elephant killers. In 1983, three local people were sentenced to 12 years in jail for killing elephants for tusks.

According to local residents, hunting elephants for tail hair has boomed in Dak Lak because people believe that luck can come from elephant tail-hair-made jewelry. Many domesticated elephants have lost their tails.

An elephant-hair-made jewelry salesman in Don Village, Dak Lak, said an elephant tail hair is priced around 200,000 dong. An elephant tail has around 1000 hairs so it is worth around 200 million dong ($11,700).

As the value of a tail is equivalent to a pair of tusks, the elephant in Ea Sup brought around 400 million for its murderers.

Hunters are not only hunting big male elephants for tusks but also female and baby elephants for tail hairs.

VietNamNet/TP