Le Thanh Trung died immediately after his neck was snapped by the elephant's trunk on Tuesday outside his home near the Na Cau forest in Quang Nam province.

After eating supper, Trung and nine other members of his family heard a noise outside their house. His wife went to check on the commotion, but Trung ushered her back inside and headed out to see for himself.

However, as he approached the pen where his buffalos were kept, he was set upon by the elephant. Villagers later chased it away, the Thanh Nien newspaper said.

Three days earlier, three elephants went on the rampage in the province's Que Son district, seriously injuring a forest ranger.

Each year in Vietnam people are killed by wild elephants desperately seeking food and water as their traditional habitats are encroached upon by logging and unchecked development.

As few as 94 elephants are thought to remain in the wild in the Southeast Asian nation, most of them in tiny herds, down from an estimated 2,000 at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Conservationists have blamed the decline on unchecked poaching, the burgeoning market for animal parts, illegal logging and the lack of will among the Vietnamese authorities to protect endangered species.

TERRA.WIRE