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A distressing video has emerged of a dying elephant being beaten and prodded with sharp objects shortly before she died.

Laxmi, a 30-year-old elephant, was beaten and starved to death by her cruel owners in India.

She was poached from the wild as a calf and separated from her mother and herd.

The endangered animal was sold into the illegal elephant trafficking industry and subjected to years of abuse and malnourishment that left her body fragile and weakened.

The severely underweight creature was unable to support the weight of her body with her bony frame.

(Image: Indiaphotoagency / SWNS.com) (Image: Indiaphotoagency / SWNS.com)

A grim video shows her owners attacking her with sharp spears, bull-hooks, and sticks to force her to move so they could earn profit from her dying and fragile body.

After her death, her carcass lay chained and shackled in the northern town of Motihari, near the border with Nepal, surrounded by urine and dung that was not cleaned for months.

The harsh reality of the cruelty and neglect that cost Laxmi her life is not uncommon for privately owned captive elephants in India.

(Image: Indiaphotoagency / SWNS.com)

Her captors fled leaving the dying elephant to spend the final agonizing hours of her life lying in filth as her life ebbed out of her frail frame.

Animal welfare organisation Wildlife SOS informed the Indian Forest Department of the situation and when a team of forest officers arrived, the owners of the elephant had disappeared.

Kartick Satyanaryan said: “We were extremely alarmed to learn of her condition, and we scrambled to get our elephant veterinarian on a plane to Bihar to try and save Laxmi.

(Image: Indiaphotoagency / SWNS.com) (Image: Indiaphotoagency / SWNS.com)

“But she’d finally given in to the agony and passed away. Wildlife SOS is determined to bring justice to Laxmi and all those elephants suffering such atrocities."

Dr Yaduraj Khadpekar said: “Though she had been relatively young, Laxmi was weak and her bones already brittle. The local veterinarians ascribed it to a degenerative skeletal or metabolic disorder, likely the result of extreme malnourishment."

Founder of Wildlife SOS, Geeta Seshamani said:“It breaks our hearts to know we could not reach Laxmi in time, but we believe that she deserves justice even if she never saw a single day of freedom.

“Such illegal trafficking, neglect, and severe abuse of elephants is intolerable, and a precedent must be set."