This story appears in the August 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. The royalty of India—Hindu and Muslim—understood long ago that power was best wielded from the back of an elephant.

WWF works to sustain the natural world for the benefit of people and wildlife, collaborating with partners from local to ...

The film highlights cultural traditions, with men painting the heads and trunks of elephants and adorning them in elaborate costumes for parades. Accompanying these beautifully decorated elephants ...

The pachyderms are used for uphill joy rides for foreign and other tourists even during peak summer. Many of them are old and ...

THRISSUR, India-It flaps its ears and squirts water from a waving trunk, but this elephant is a life-size mechanical replica rolled out to replace the endangered animals in India’s Hindu temples.

So imagine our surprise when we discovered tantalising photographic evidence of the largest land animal on the continent - the Asian elephant - not only navigating the steep landscape of India’s ...