Being chased away by villagers, a wild male elephant met a tragic end in Karnataka’s Nagarhole National Park after it got stranded on a railway fence, suffocated on its own body weight and died.

The 42-year-old wild tusker, sources in the forest department said, was being driven away by villagers for attempting to return to the Veerahosahalli range of the national park when it came across the railway fence and attempted to scale it.

It got stranded atop the fence, dangling midair and died due to suffocation after its own weight crushed its diaphragm.
Due to their sheer size, the elephants have several adaptations that allow them to respire. Unlike other mammals, the massive lungs of an elephant are directly attached to the chest cavity and the diaphragm and they breathe by reflexively moving their chest and diaphragm. "What this means is that if the chest or diaphragm is squeezed too much, the animal will die. Its body is adapted to ensure that it doesn't ever put any pressure on its chest. However in this case, the more the elephant struggled to get free, the more it exerted pressure on its chest and eventually suffocated," a forest department official said.

The fence was erected by the forest department as part of a Rs 212 crore project to mitigate the elephant conflict, envisaged in 2015, the railway fence is first-of-its-kind in Nagarhole wildlife reserve. The idea was to create a 33 km along rail fence the first phase in four forest divisions. These were to exist alongside elephant-proof trenches and used discarded tracks procured from the railways.