High-speed train kills seven elephants in India; five carriages derail

In the early hours of a December morning in Assam, seven wild Asian elephants — among them several calves — were killed when a high-speed express train struck their herd crossing railway tracks in Hojai district. The driver saw them and braked, but physics and momentum had already written the outcome. No human life was lost, yet the collision asks an older and harder question: in a landscape where nearly 6,000 elephants follow routes shaped by memory and water rather than by maps, who bears responsibility for the places where their world and ours collide without warning?