Fact Check: Guruvayur Temple Denies Claims of Gifting Baby Elephant To Tiruchendur Murugan Temple

A seemingly joyful and ‘dancing’ baby elephant gifted by Guruvayur temple to the Tiruchendur Murugan temple.

Archived version of such a claim can be seen here.

The claims come in the wake of PETA and famous sitar maestro Anoushka Shankar donating a life-size mechanical elephant as a humane alternative to live elephants traditionally used in temple rituals to Kombara Sreekrishna Swami temple in Kerala’s Thrissur.

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On closely analysing the viral video, we found that the music in the background was actually a Christian devotional song praising the birth of Jesus. This raised our doubts. 

We did a keyword search and found that there were no news reports about any such gifting by Guruvayur temple. We then ran a reverse image search on one of the keyframes of the video and found the video from the Instagram account of village_walker dated December 18, 2024 who claimed that the video belonged to a page called Voice of Thrissur. 

We found the same video in the Facebook page of Voice of Thrissur posted on August, 8 2024. However the music and song in the video is different. 

This proves that the video is not recent and is not linked to PETA’s donation of a robotic elephant.

We spoke to the admin of the Voice of Thrissur page who confirmed that video was not from Kerala and that he had found the video on internet. “We used in it in our page to get some traffic to our page,” he added.

We also contacted the Guruvayur Dewaswom Board Public Relations Office. The office informed us  that such an incident has not happened. He said that there was no custom of Guruvayur temple donating elephants. In fact, the custom is of people donating elephants to Guruvayur as per the custom of Nadakkiruthal. The elephant in the video is also not from Guruvayur temple, he added.

Result:False

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Sources
Telephone conversation with Guruvayur Dewaswom Board PR office
Instagram Post by village_walker on December 18,2024
Facebook Post by Voice of Thrissur on August 8,2024
Telephone Conversation with the admin of Voice of Thrissur

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