I picked up a copy of El Paso’s El Diario newspaper in Spanish yesterday and leafed through it, seeing how much I could understand. In the “Juarez” section, a photo of an elephant lying in the road caught my eye. The headline under the photo read, “provoca elefanta choque fatal.”
Elephant and fatal seemed clear; it must be a dead elephant. I picked out the word “autobus” further down in the caption and something about the “conductor” … “perdío el control del vehiculo.” Ah, the driver lost control of his bus and hit the elephant. I saw the word “murío” in the same sentence discussing the driver so I assumed he also died.
So far, so good. But what was an elephant doing on the streets? “Escapó.” A near-English word. The elephant must have escaped.
But surely I’d translated this little story wrong. Elephants don’t get loose in towns on the outskirts of Mexico City to be hit by a bus. I went to the Internet. And there was the story, straight from the Canadian Press website.
“MEXICO CITY — A Mexican bus driver has been killed after running into an escaped circus elephant.”
No bus driver could have survived hitting a 4 ½ ton pachyderm. Tomas Lopez, the driver, died, and four passengers were injured in the pre-dawn crash.
The state press said Indra, the elephant, escaped from its cage when the keeper came to feed it. It knocked down a metal door leading to the street, wandered through a couple of neighborhoods, and then tried to cross the highway.
Thirty-six hours after the accident, Indra had not been buried, due to bureaucratic hurdles. (Where DO you bury a deceased elephant?)
Authorities seized two Asian elephants and 10 Siberian tigers from the circus following the sad accident, saying the animals were all at risk of escaping because of the lack of proper locks. It may have been only a matter of time before another elephant suffered the same fate, as inspectors found the elephants were merely tied to the tire of a trailer.
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