Why a herd of Chinese Elephants is travelling continuously? - Burning Issues

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Since March 2020, a family of wild elephants in southwest China has trekked more than 300 miles, traveling north through fields, highways, villages and towns.
They have stolen crops, rolled around in villagers’ courtyards looking for food, and broken into a car dealership where they drank buckets of water and left muddy footprints.
The herd has been labeled “The Northbound Wild Elephant Eating and Walking Tour.”

In one incident, a young elephant reportedly raided a villager’s stores of corn liquor and fell behind, according to the Eshan police.
“We have no way of telling where they are going,” Chen Mingyong, a professor at Yunnan University who studies wild elephants, told state broadcaster CCTV.
“It is common for Asian elephants to migrate, but in the past that has mostly been to look for food within their habitats.”

Since setting out in spring last year from Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve, on China’s far southwestern border with Laos, the elephants have trotted down the middle of a narrow county street, past a shuttered car dealership and gawking residents.
They have gotten into stores of grains left over from fermentation, leading to reports of at least one drunken elephant. They have devoured truckloads of corn and pineapples left out by government officials in an effort to divert them to less populated areas — and then continued on their way.

It’s the farthest-known movement of elephants in China, according to experts. But no one knows that where they’ll go next. When they’ll stop, it is also not clear.
It makes a think of the movie ‘NOMADLAND’.
They have captivated Chinese social media, jolted local officials and caused more than $1.1 million of damage. They have also left elephant researchers scratching their heads.

After the conservation efforts, China’s elephant population has grown in recent years, from fewer than 200 several decades ago to around 300 today, according to official statistics but actual numbers are unclear. At the same time, deforestation has reduced their habitat.
The elephants’ growing proximity to humans has emboldened the animals. And, they’re smart, as they began breaching the boundaries of nature reserves and crossing into more populated areas, they discovered that crops were more appealing than their usual forest fare.

Basically Elephants learned there is so much food, it’s so nutritious, it’s so easy to harvest and it’s safe. “This means that elephants have been going back to places where they had been absent for a long time.”
As a result, it’s unsurprising to see elephants wandering beyond their usual habitats, he said, and the phenomenon is likely to continue as their population continues to grow.

In India in the early 2000s, dozens of elephants wandered to a human-inhabited river island, and despite efforts to push them to unpopulated areas, are still roaming nearby today as a “homeless herd.”

According to a principal investigator, Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, who specializes in elephants, they want to conserve elephants and tigers. But they don’t have 10,000 square kilometers to put these elephants and tigers.

In April, the elephants were spotted around Yuanjiang County, about 230 miles north of the nature reserve.
By then, a few elephants had turned around, while others had been born. The group now consists of 15 animals.
Their journey appears to have begun last March, when 16 elephants were seen moving from the nature reserve northward toward the city of Pu’er, in southern Yunnan Province.

Conclusion

Inexperienced leadership” of the elephant in charge could be another reason for the long journey to nowhere “Maybe it got it wrong but still thinks it’s going the right way

Some experts have also discussed whether it is a random choice in itself, which makes sense in my opinion