Elephants

Asian elephants being loaded onto a truck in Fort Wayne trampled a circus animal trainer to death after the man fell down, authorities said. Pierre Spenle, 40, fell beneath the elephants when a security bar he was leaning on gave way. "Once he's on the floor, animal trainers will tell you, he's no longer the trainer. He's another object as if he were a basketball or whatever thrown in among the elephants' feet," Coroner Jan Brandenberger said.

A South African judge ruled that 30 young elephants had been treated cruelly and awarded temporary custody of them to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The elephants' plight had drawn international concern, igniting protests in Washington and London. The elephants' owner, animal exporter Riccardo Ghiazza, had planned to sell them to zoos in Europe and a safari park in China.

Elephants on the island of Borneo, believed to be the smallest in the world, have been reclassified as a distinct subspecies after new genetic tests, a wildlife official said. Intestinal cells collected from elephant dung were sent for genetic testing at Columbia University in New York, where researchers found that the Borneo herd separated from their Asian cousins 300,000 years ago.

Poachers killed 10 elephants in a wildlife sanctuary and hacked off the ivory tusks that are selling at a record price on the world market, a government official said Sunday. The Saturday morning slaughter in Tsavo National Park, about 220 miles southeast of Nairobi, brought to 160 the number of elephants killed in Kenya since April. Police mounted a ground and air search for the poachers and arrested a man carrying four elephant tusks.

Six elephants escaped from an amusement park and rampaged through Seoul, officials said. All were eventually captured and returned to the park. One elephant hit Roh In-sun, 52, with its trunk, the Yonhap news agency said. She was being treated at a hospital. Television footage showed one elephant breaking a glass door to enter a restaurant. "Three elephants came.... I hid in the closet," owner Choi Yoon-sun said.

Dozens of elephants have been terrorizing a village in eastern Zaire, tearing up plantation land during nightly visits, a news agency reported Tuesday. Up to 30 elephants were trampling land in and around the village of Indinga, about 115 miles west of the Rwanda border town of Bukavu, the government-controlled news agency said. The elephants had not been seen in the area for four years, but a government crackdown on poachers may have cleared the way for their return.

Robert Pattinson has nothing but love for his recent experience on the set of "Water for Elephants," director Francis Lawrence's adaptation of the popular novel that's set to open in theaters Friday. It was a far cry from his current job, finishing the grueling six-month shoot for the back-to-back filming of the last two "Twilight" films, based on Stephenie Meyer's final book in her bestselling series of young adult novels, "Breaking Dawn. " Pattinson Pattinson took a moment for a brief phone interview before he was needed on the set of a night shoot for the vampire mega-hit.

Elephants that wander outside Chad's Zakouma National Park are being illegally slaughtered for their tusks, biologist Mike Fay of the Wildlife Conservation Society said Wednesday. Fay discovered five separate massacre sites totaling 100 individuals during a survey in the first week of August. The region was home to 300,000 elephants 30 years ago, but the number is now down to about 10,000.

A herd of 18 elephants used in circuses that tour the United States was infected with the human strain of tuberculosis, the U.S. Department Agriculture confirmed. Officials first became aware that the elephants were ill in August, when two of them, Hattie and Joyce, who were on tour with the Circus Vargas in California, collapsed and died. USDA spokesman Jamie Amberosi said: "It is a big investigation, and we're giving it a high priority."

Intoxicated elephants searching for rice beer rampaged through a remote settlement in India, killing five people, injuring 12 others and forcing thousands of terrified villagers to flee, an official said. "People should stop making this liquor, as elephants are drawn by the smell," advised Deb Roy, the state's forestries director, after the weekend stampede through Behali village, 1,140 miles east of New Delhi in Assam state.