Elephant Kills Woman And Then Shows Up To Her Funeral And Tramples Her Corpse, Sparking Memes About How They Never Forget

An elephant in India that reportedly killed a woman in a trampling incident showed up at her funeral, dragged her body off a funeral pyre and then proceeded to trample her corpse again.

Details of the viral news story are sparse, and it’s unclear if the woman did anything to provoke or upset the elephant. According to witnesses, 70-year-old Maya Muru was collecting water from a tube well when the first elephant attack took place.

Before the second attack later that evening, her body was on top of a funeral pyre with her family assembled, doing her last rites. The animal burst in, lifted her body from the pyre, trampled it and then threw it some distance before running off into the woods again.

Given the intelligence of elephants, many experts find it unlikely that the attack was random. In the pages of Newsweek, Duncan McNair, who leads the charity Save The Asian Elephants, said that the elephant may have associated Muru with a past trauma suffered by it or its herd.

A number of users on Twitter agreed with that analysis, attributing the elephant’s extreme actions to a long-held grudge, or its astrological sign.

Elephants and humans in eastern India are increasingly coming into conflict, with another high-profile elephant attack taking place Monday after a herd wandered onto farmland and could not be contained by forest rangers.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, 100 to 300 people die of elephant attacks in India every year, as habitat loss and fragmentation drive the large animals into human settlements. Purported abuse of elephants for the tourism industry in India is also blamed for some human-elephant conflicts.

The recent news led to many memes and posts about elephants, appreciating their power and also their capacity to enter goblin mode.