China's elephants feel the squeeze

Dinah Gardner, Al Jazeera
December 16, 2008

China's wild elephants are so rare – there are only about 300 left in the southern province of Yunnan – that when American tourist Jeremy McGill stumbled across a group earlier this year in a nature reserve he whipped out his camera and started taking photos.

It was a move that almost cost him his life.

"I was alone when I came across the four elephants," he remembers. "One scooped me up into his mouth and bit me. My body was folded in half, my head between my knees, and then the elephant spat me out and stomped on me… Suddenly they stopped and walked away… I was found about an hour later just lying there with my intestines hanging out of my body."

A few weeks after McGill was hurled to the ground, a Chinese migrant worker was crushed to death by an elephant on his way home inside another nature reserve. In June, an elephant killed a female hawker at Wild Elephant Valley, the same nature reserve that McGill was attacked.

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