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AGENDA ANALYSIS

Last hurrah for captive elephants?

All over Asia, domesticated elephants are disappearing, but they may yet have one final role to play, says Clive Grylls.

In 2011, the Elephant Conservation Centre opened in Laos with the aim of supplementing the country’s ‘domesticated’ elephant population through a managed breeding programme.

It was necessary, said Sebastien Duffillot of the Laos-based organisation Elefantasia and co-founder of the centre, because, with only 450 domesticated elephants left in the country, they are becoming increasingly rare.

Many still work in the logging industry, but demand for their ‘services’ is dying out. And there is another problem: domesticated

Asian elephants were traditionally replenished from the wild, but this is now banned.

Breeding from captive elephants is costly, however: gestation lasts two years and another two passes before the calf is weaned. For their riders, or mahouts, this can mean four years’ lost income. In Laos, 15 elephants die every year, but only four are born. “Laos’ domesticated elephants could be gone in 40 years,” Duffillot said.

Elephants have been domesticated in South-east Asia for 4,000 years. In Laos, they were once as common as cows

SHOULD WE RIDE ELEPHANTS? yes no

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Gilles Maurer Co-founder, Elefantasia, Laos

We do not provide rides for tourists at the Elephant Conservation Centre, but we do support the activity in the rest of Laos, providing it is done under a strict code.

These rides are always one person to one elephant, trekking through forest and starting and ending in villages. They are organised by a mahout association we helped to set up.

We are also drafting a decree about the use of elephants in logging and tourism, covering dietary and veterinary needs and the ages when elephants should start work and retire.

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Jack Highwood Elephant Valley Project, Cambodia Every day I say to people who visit our sanctuary, “Isn’t it odd that we want to ride elephants?

We don’t ride hippos or tigers.”

The elephants in our sanctuary belong to the Bunong people. We don’t support the capture of wild elephants, and the Bunong are against the breeding of captive animals, so the current generation of domesticated elephants here may end up being its last.

And so we don’t allow elephant-rides, because we want this last generation to live with dignity, roaming free in the forest.

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in Europe, but with increasing mechanisation, their place in society is disappearing.

Whether we should mourn this loss is a matter for debate.

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genetically the

same as their Domesticating cousins. elephants may involve wildRichard depriving them of Lair, the author Gone Astray: food and sleep.” Theof care and

DOMESTIC PAIN For the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), it is no bad thing, because it believes that domestication is cruel. It starts when elephants are four years old and may involve beating them and depriving them of food and sleep until their independence is broken.

But the Asian elephant is much rarer than its African relative, with a population in the wild of some 35,000 animals. More significantly, this has fallen by 50 per cent over the past 60–75 years.

Some people believe that domesticated elephants could act as an ‘ark’ that guarantees the species’ survival. Unlike dogs or cows, Asian elephants have never been selectively bred, so they are

management of the Asian elephant in domesticity, argues that captive elephants can be reintroduced into the wild. Indeed, this has happened – in Thailand, the Elephant Reintroduction Foundation manages three forest sanctuaries, into which 93 elephants have so far been released.

But elephant reintroductions are unlikely to contribute much to the conservation of the species, because the main problems it faces are shortage of habitat and conflict with humans. In much of Asia, wild elephants are regarded as pests, and worse, because of crop-raiding, and in India alone, at least 150 people die every year from encounters with elephants.

So if domesticated elephants aren’t going to be released back into the wild, what role can they play? They are still a huge tourist February 2013

MARK CARWARDINE On the wild thoughts that won’t let him sleep. This month:

The non-appliance of science

W Elephants at the conservation centre in Laos are well-treated, but that isn’t true for domesticated animals throughout Asia.

attraction, but is that a good reason to maintain this tradition?

Perhaps not. Sangduen Chailert, who runs a sanctuary called the Elephant Nature Park in northern Thailand, argues that at least half of the camps in the region are “open prisons” that deny their elephants proper food, shade and shelter.

Then there’s the thorny issue of whether it’s okay to ride elephants (see box, left). Chailert doesn’t permit it because "my elephants have been rescued and I don’t want them to be abused again.”

Elefantasia is working with Richard Lair to draw up a set of voluntary guidelines for camps and sanctuaries in South-east Asia, and it provides information on its website advising tourists what to look out for before making their choice of where to go. Both Lonely Planet and Rough Guides have recommendations for the best places to enjoy ‘ethical’ elephant rides, too, so for visitors to Asia for whom a holiday would not be complete without sitting on an elephant, the message is – carry on, just do your research first.

왘 BACKGROUND

Q As well as being wo working r g rkin ha a ave animals, elephants have been used in war, as s elevated platforms for hunting from, in ceremonies and as status symbols.

February 2013

Q Both the Buddhist and Hindu faiths revere the Asian elephant for its wisdom and strength – the ‘elephant god’, Ganesha elepha p (below), (below w), iis sw widely worshipped.

Elephants Elep eph han nt may have first been in Asia for en ‘e ‘‘employed’ m religious reli eligiou gious purposes.

Q Outside O of Thailand an nd Burma, indigenous and people are the keepers pe eo of the remaining of most m dom m domesticated elephants.

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In the past nine years, fisheries ministers have ignored scientific advice in 87 per cent of decisions.”

Mark Carwardine is a zoologist, photographer, writer, conservationist and BBC TV presenter.

BBC Wildlife

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Q The Asian elephant was probably first ‘domesticated’ about 4,000 years ago by the Harappan, or Indus Valley, y, culture in present-day da ay Pakistan.

which is over-subsidised and hy do over-sized in any case. government Our own fisheries minister, ministers Richard Beynon, wants to repeatedly override restrictions on ignore good scientific advice cod fishing, despite strong – even when it’s advice they evidence that populations paid for themselves? have not sufficiently The fiasco over badgers recovered. With people like and bovine tuberculosis him in the fray, the North (bTB), where Defra blatantly Sea cod recovery plan (and snubbed the results of similar plans for other fish decades of research to order stocks) simply won’t work. a cull, due to begin later this The Common Fisheries year, is one example.

Policy is currently under Then, at the end of 2012, review. This could well be Defra announced that it planned to designate There’s only 31 of the 127 nothing cod Marine Conservation about cod Zones recommended science. for English waters.

According to The Wildlife Trusts, this goes against the advice of more than one million stakeholders in the marine environment – advice that was gathered at a cost of nearly £9m.

But fisheries ministers of EU member states are the worst of the lot. Analysis

by WWF shows that, in the past nine years, they have ignored scientific advice in a mind-boggling 87 per cent of their decisions.

They repeatedly set fishing quotas that are far too high the last chance to get it right, and continue to allow vast but I doubt that politicians quantities of fish to be are about to undergo a thrown overboard. The EU Damascene conversion. concedes that 88 per cent How hard can it be? of European fish stocks are Without proper regulations overexploited. Yet fisheries ministers don’t have the guts there will be no fish, and without fish, no fishing. It’s to stand up to the interests not rocket science. of the fishing industry,