The maintenance and training of circus elephants involves emotional and physical abuse. Elephants in circuses are reduced to objects of entertainment for people. An elephant's place is in the wild with its relatives and companions. The totally unnatural existence for circus elephants is a travesty and to allow this practice to continue is unjustified and unethical. The life of a temple elephant may be marginally better than in a circus but nowadays, it is definitely harder than in many zoos where increasing awareness is leading to a global trend of more-natural habitats and a system of protected-contact with humans.
Accompanied by deforestation and expanding human occupation of previously wild areas, there is now increasing contact between humans and elephants. The ever-shrinking and fragmented nature of elephant habitats has only meant more raids on crop fields, attacks on humans and the presence of elephants in human villages. Three decades ago, wild elephants were known to have killed close to people in a year, but today, there are more than deaths ascribed to elephants in India.
Without the taming of these wild elephants and without providing them a safe enclave, these conflicts will only increase. Also, as one can imagine, maintaining the sanctity of elephants can help in protecting them from humans when conflicts eventually arise.
Thankfully, there are ways out of this stalemate. In fact, a large body of research done over the past few decades has identified newer, better methods of elephant capture, taming and training. There have also been successful interventions to prevent contact with humans. It is hard to believe that despite the long history of interactions between humans and elephants more than 2, years , many of our methods are based on myths and superstitions that have persisted into modern times.
In fact, many mahouts find the amount of apparently unnecessary cruelty in the form of the use of knives, iron-tipped spears, ropes, starvation and fire as appalling. And yet, its use is propagated because of a lack of awareness of better, less cruel methods.
What is thus needed is greater awareness of alternative methods of training and a real understanding of the impact of our actions on the elephants. Animal-friendly training methods have been used for many years now with other species like dogs and horses but the tradition and the historical baggage surrounding elephant training makes it more challenging in this case. Training and handling of elephants by techniques of positive reinforcement, habituation and other animal-friendly techniques rather than by methods of punishment has yielded better results.
These approaches cause fewer health issues, better and faster compliance from the animals and build a stronger bond with the mahout and with humans in general. Mahouts who have seen it in practice have also been very eager to learn it. These methods however are most effective only when learnt from professionals and this is where regulations and government policies can come in play. Many organisations such as Elephant Experts provide training in these methods based on scientific principles and observations.
These methods work at any age but work especially well in young calves, who are ready and eager to learn. This is akin to what one would do while teaching kids a new skill by kind words, encouragement and small rewards as opposed to brutal beatings and punishments! The animal also tends to learn better in a friendly atmosphere than when paralysed by fear and stress. Conditions of captive elephants can also be improved by being more aware and sensitive to their needs.
Keeping them free in enclosed, natural conditions as opposed to keeping them chained all the time would significantly improve their quality of life and mental state. Providing softer, more natural surfaces as opposed to hard, concrete floors would also resolve their chronic health problems.
Access to proper health assessment, using elephants during appropriate times of the day and not during high noon , gradual habituation to the sights, smells and crowds, and using milder forms of punishment like tickling can all go a long way in making the elephants more comfortable and less perturbable.
This can make them calmer and safer for the people who work in and around elephants. Many of our conflicts with wild animals are the result of expanding human influence and presence, leading to fragmentation and destruction of wild habitats. Currently, the government captures these problematic elephant herds and tries to rehabilitate them at one its many camps. The long-term solutions for these problems will be to check population growth and urbanisation, establish national parks, increase the legal protections of animals and public awareness.
In the short-term, many creative efforts have been made to achieve peaceful human cohabitation with these animals. A case in point is the adoption of technology in the Valaparai region of Tamil Nadu to reduce conflicts between humans and elephants. Valaparai, a biodiversity hotspot in the western Ghats, used to be a large tract of tropical rainforest but is now reduced to patches of rainforest interspersed with tea plantations and human settlements each hosting up to , people.
Today, close to a hundred wild elephants find themselves drowning in this sea of humanity. The system, initiated from onwards, is coupled to an elephant informant network, which receives and passes on messages about elephant presence to people in the area. With the widespread use of mobile phones a bulk-SMS system is being used to inform people on a daily basis.
Elephant presence is also communicated as a crawl on the local cable TV channel. Additionally, GSM-based elephant alert red indicator lights are mounted in over 25 prominent locations and remotely operated when elephants are within 1 km.
These methods have been well received and implemented by the community and are proving to be effective. A prototype GSM-based voice system for public transport buses to inform passengers before they alight is also being tested. This has brought about a big reduction in surprise encounters between men and wildlife and has drastically reduced the number of accidents.
A detailed database of subscribers of about 2, people , their place of residence, detailed maps and the location of the animals has also been prepared to identify the more important corridors through which the elephant herds move; this has been used to classify the most vulnerable areas. Within a short span of two years, these interventions have reduced the incidents of property damage e.
According to the forest department, while 2. These interventions are also managed by the community based on extensive dialogue and rely on existing and easily managed technology, making the entire program sustainable and expandable.
Funded by the UK-based charity Elephant Family, other international agencies and some local tea plantations, this is a wonderful and sustainable example of using human ingenuity in resource-poor environments to tackle the complex problem of human-animal conflicts. The long-term hope is that such local measures, awareness campaigns and solutions will provide our wild animals an opportunity to co-exist with the human sprawl.
One also hopes that the governments of developing countries will soon wake up to realise their long-standing neglect of our ecological resources in the pursuit of higher GDPs and industrialisation.
While progress is essential, it must not come at the expense of our biodiversity and natural resources. We must learn to use and conserve our unique resources by employing more conservation-oriented policies.
While these are big problems and the solutions require a lot more investment from people and institutions, the good thing is that we are not as powerless as it may seem. Our biggest strengths and weapons are our wallets and our voice.
We can decide the kind of practices we choose to encourage and support. We, as people, parents and teachers, can raise awareness about the plight of these animals, inform people about the lesser-known aspects of their behaviour and inject a sense of wonder. We can help spread awareness about the nobler and gentler methods of animal training. We can discourage the use of animals in religious processions or at least insist on better conditions for them.
We can protest against the unethical treatment of animals in other countries by withdrawing our tourism dollars and we can actively urge our governments for better legislation and law enforcement. Here was Moses offering them redemption. Yet, they were so beaten down and accustomed to slavery that, like the elephants, they simply couldn't see it right before their eyes.
The Hebrew says they wouldn't listen to Moses " mekotzer ruah ," which is usually translated as "their spirits were crushed" or "shortness of spirit. Literally, their eyes were those of slaves -- cast upon the ground, avoiding eye contact, unassertive, not aggressive, non-threatening, without real vision. Figuratively, they had been slaves so long they simply could not imagine anything better, bolder, brighter, bigger for their lives.
They lost the ability to dream, to visualize their lives as free men and women, to embrace a vision of a better life and a better them. One of my frustrations almost daily as a rabbi is to see so many who still live like our ancestors in Egypt. They are fearful to have a vision of their lives that exalts them and could set them free. What this biblical story teaches us is that just as the elephant could set himself free if he only chose, we can do the same for ourselves, as well.
What I have learned about life is that most often the real difference between personal slavery and freedom is simply vision. It is recognizing that it is ours to choose; that the chains with which we are held are mostly in our minds and not around our ankles.
It took the children of Israel a long time to realize what most of us must learn as well -- that freedom is ours to take, hope is ours to embrace, and meaning and purpose in life are ours to envision at any moment in our lives. So my resolution for this New Year is to do whatever I can to constantly remind myself and those I serve that attitude is everything in life, and if you think you can or think you can't you are probably right. This year just might be a year of personal liberation for us all.
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