From almost the moment Maharaj had been locked in, he beat his head and trunk against the sides of his small wooden cage. Using his body as a wrecking ball, the Asian elephant succeeded in cracking two of its logs. Other than stopping to eat a bit of sugarcane and coconut leaves, his violent attempts to free himself were constant, people present at the elephant camp in India’s Anamalai Tiger Reserve told the Hindu.

Then around 4:10 p.m. on June 21, Maharaj slammed himself into the wooden structure one last time and collapsed. Within five minutes, he was dead.

He’d been in captivity for 46 hours.

A postmortem examination concluded that Maharaj died from multiple fractures on the front of his