It’s many a wildlife-loving child’s dream: an elephant coming to school to enliven the daily tedium of classes. In one school in Sabah that dream came true on a recent morning when a wild elephant suddenly showed up in school and walked through the canteen. Then again, the sight of…

Pygmy elephants are placid creatures but they can turn violent if they feel threatened. If that happens, they can become a danger to themselves and people. And so it was recently in some villages in the Telupid district of Sabah where three wild Bornean pygmy elephants, which belonged to a…

Many poachers do not go about killing wild animals out of fun. Nor do many farmers take revenge on wild animals just because they feel like it. Rather, there are routinely economic reasons behind both wildlife poaching and revenge attacks against animals, like elephants, that destroy crops, thereby unwittingly inviting…

Every now and then reports of orphaned Bornean pygmy elephants being rescued by the Sabah Wildlife Department surface. These baby elephants have become lost while their mothers are nowhere to be seen. In the past seven years 22 baby elephants have been rescued this way. Many of them cannot survive,…

A wild bull elephant that trampled a middle-aged worker to death at a timber plantation in Tawau, Sabah, is now himself dead. The animal was shot and killed by an official of the Sabah Wildlife Department. Justice done? It depends how you look at it. The department’s director Augustine Tuuga explained…