Owing to her age, and near loss of vision, Vatsala was confined to the Elephant Camp at Hinauta and was taken daily to the Khairaiya Nala for bathing, where she was found bleeding from the toenail at around 11.30 am on Monday, sources told this newspaper. Due to digestive health issues, she was long on a special diet of porridge.Rescued from the jungles of Kerala’s Nilambur, Vatsala was brought to the Bori Wildlife Sanctuary in MP in 1972.Though there is no documentation available in Kerala about her age, the mahout who took care of her during the Bori days, had claimed in 2020 that Vatsala was brought to MP when aged around 50. Also, the old age of any elephant is determined by falling of premolar and molar teeth (such teeth fall when the elephant is 60-70 years old), which in Vatsala’s case happened around four decades ago. This suggests that she could well have been aged above 100, making her perhaps the oldest surviving elephant in the world before her death on Tuesday afternoon.“She was definitely older than Dakshayani, a female elephant owned by the Travancore Devaswom Board, which died aged 88 in 2019 and also older than Lin Wang, the male elephant that died aged 87 in Taipei in 2003,” sources claimed.
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