ELEPHANT'S REVENGE DEATH BY DOODY

Notorious ivory poacher found buried under pile of elephant poop

CRUEL ivory poacher went to meet his Maker the hard way when an angry elephant backed him against a tree, squatted like a collie -- and buried him alive under a Toyota- sized mound of stinky pachyderm poo. "I'm sure there must be worse ways to die -- I just can't think of them," says Marshall Klein, a wildlife officer in Nairobi, Kenya. "Basically the poacher suffocated in a pile of elephant ca-ca. "It must have been like falling in a tar pit. That stuff is very sticky. If you step in it by accident, it'll pull the shoes right off your feet. And the smell, good God! Think Porta-Potty on steroids." Nobody can say for sure exactly what happened after twice-convicted poacher Sean Kennerman, 48, illegally entered a protected wildlife preserve in the middle of the night. But a large ivory tusk strapped to his backpack, says Klein, "proves he was up to no good." "These poachers are slaughtering elephants into extinction -- and Klein was one of the worst. He's been arrested at least 15 times with ivory, and he's done hard time in jail twice. "But here he was again back in the preserve, up to his old tricks. Except this time he faced something he didn't count on -- the back side of a bull elephant." The poacher's body was found by tour guide Jennifer Marcus, who stumbled on the still-steaming pile shortly after daybreak and spotted a single hand clawing the air like a zombie emerging from a grave. "I wasn't sure if it was real or one of those rubber hands people put in salads and try to scare you with at Halloween," she says. "But I wasn't about to take chances. So I called the police and told them, 'You better get out here.'" Cops armed with shovels and pitchforks and wearing gas masks extricated Klein's body from the approximate 750-pound "load" he was buried under. "His face was frozen in a grotesque mask of agony," says one policeman. "It's hard to say how long he had been there. "The pile was still warm to the touch, so it couldn't have been more than a few hours." News of the poacher's "death by doody" traveled fast and elicited an outpouring of grief, not for the dead poacher -- but for the elephants that are being killed for their tusks. "I wish the elephants would 'sit and s---' on every poacher," says one animal lover. "Those slimeballs deserve the WORST the animal kingdom can give them."