Kids sore as tuskers' cricket match banned

PATNA: The much-publicised cricket match between the two elephants, Arjun and Rupa, scheduled to be played at the Sanjay Gandhi Zoological Park on Tuesday, was cancelled by the order of chief wildlife warden, Bihar, Bashir Ahmad Khan. The zoo director, Ranvir Singh, said that the match was cancelled by the order of Khan, according to whom “zoo is not a fit place for such an event.�
The decision to cancel the match dampened the spirit of kids who had assembled in large number much ahead of the scheduled time from different parts of city to watch the ‘unique’ match.“It’s really disheartening. We had come with great hope,� said Anand.
The parents, too, had a tough time convincing their wards that the match was cancelled. Chintu and Raju, who live in a locality near the zoo, kept on demanding from their parents, “match dekh ke jayenge, hathi lao�, and started crying. The rain came to the rescue of the assembled parents who took it as an alibi for the cancellation of the match.
Most of the parents accompanying the kids said that if there was any confusion among the officials about the laws permitting such type of match, they should not have announced it.
The former director of the Botanical Survey of India, Vijay Krishnan, who was there to see the match said that the authorities should have appreciated the work of Singh as it was for the first time in India that a cricket match of elephants was organised in a zoo.
“I really can’t understand why the match was cancelled,� he said, and added that “it could have helped in increasing the revenue of the zoo.�
Krishnan said that since the elephants were trained by the trainers of Indian Circus, the question of cruelty while training the elephants was also absent in this case.