Introduction

Introduction

The management of the Asian elephant is quite anomalous in the conservation world, with circumstances quite bizarre compared to other large mammals. Elephas maximus Linn., 1758, an endangered species listed in Appendix I of CITES, is thought to number between 37,000 and 48,000 animals in the wild. Scattered through thirteen countries, the wild elephant is nearly everywhere severely threatened by habitat destruction, poaching, and fragmentation into small, isolated groups. Many population biologists believe that nowhere in Asia is there a single wild population large enough to avoid inbreeding over the long term. Of the two large captive groups outside of Asia, the population in European zoos and circuses is essentially moribund with most cows too old to breed, while the North American population is far from self-sustaining at a time when both law and public opinion make it ever harder to keep elephants.

So far this a depressing but altogether too familiar litany, different only in detail from many other vanishing species. But quite unlike any other endangered large mammal, it so happens that as an artefact of an ancient Asian tradition there exist about 16,000 Asian elephants kept in captivity in eleven different Asian countries. Never bred selectively, these animals are genetically and behaviorally wild elephants. Quite unlike most zoo-raised animals, the majority of these elephants are totally conditioned to the wild. If released into nature probably over two out of three domesticated elephants in Asia would survive and many would mate. It is as if there was a pool of thousands of okapis, or white rhinos, or snow leopards which could be released with an extraordinary success rate. Astonishingly, about 12,000 of these Asian elephants are largely ignored by governments and remain private property pure and simple. In any Asian country, even those which have ratified CITES, anybody with the money can buy as many domesticated elephants as desired and then treat them however desired, with the single proviso that the elephants cannot be sold out of the country.

Many difficult questions are posed by Asia’s domesticated elephants. Are they are an invaluable resource in wildlife conservation? Or are they an outdated cultural relic which should be allowed to fade away? What do they represent to the nations that possess them? What do they mean to the West? Is it incumbent on man to extend, if not management, at least a degree of succor to these troubled animals?

Development and habitat destruction have brought a plethora of problems to privately-owned elephants in Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka: poor legal protection, incomplete registration, bureaucratic indifference, poor veterinary care, skewed prices reflecting rarity value, shifting ownership patterns, and a disturbing drop in the quality of young mahouts.

Arthur Koestler wrote in The Act of Creation that “we can discuss Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in terms of (a) historical significance, (b) military strategy, (c) the condition of his liver, (d) the constellation of his planets.” Similarly, it is both possible and necessary to discuss the domesticated Asian elephant’s decline in terms of (a) its loss of significance in national economies, (b) the difficulties of unfreezing elephant sperm, (c) the relative sexual ineptitude of bull elephants deprived of opportunities for adolescent sex play, and (d) alcoholism and feelings of inferiority amongst low caste mahouts. Wider issues affecting management include habitat destruction and the waning influence of Buddhist and Hindu precepts in daily life.

The scientific and technical disciplines of biology, forestry, veterinary medicine, animal husbandry, and law are obviously essential in managing domesticated elephants. Less obviously, the crucial caretaking function performed by mahouts and owners requires the entry of humanities such as social anthropology and sociology, as well as more arcane subjects such as comparative religion, social history, linguistics, etc. The study and management of domesticated elephants is consequently as much art as science. In terms of precision or being a ‘hard science’, the management and conservation of domesticated elephants is to wildlife biology, for example, what wildlife biology is to chemistry or physics. Macro-management of domesticated elephants is a hybrid, catch-all science much like sociology, and thinking on the ‘sociology’ of elephants in man-created environments is as primitive as was human sociology in its infancy, with the need to define fundamentals just beginning to be perceived.

Keeping elephants also has an ethical dimension. Sadly, a particular sub-set of sociology, penology, might be a more accurate comparison for elephant keeping. Elephant management raises ethical issues such as - expressed in their human equivalent - kidnapping, forced labor, starvation rations, solitary confinement, torture, and even capital punishment. Drawing Western-derived ethical conclusions makes little sense, however, while witnessing the demise of over four millennia of elephant keeping in Asia.

Wild elephants

The Asian elephant is in severe trouble in all range states. The problems facing the elephant - deforestation, human encroachment, poaching, etc. - are best described systematically in The Asian Elephant: An Action Plan for its Conservation (Santiapillai and Jackson, 1990).

Table 1: Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in the wild, 1996

¹Estimates compiled by Dr. Charles Santiapillai on behalf of the IUCN/SSC Asian Elephant Specialist Group (Pers. comm., 1996).

According to Dr. Charles Santiapillai (Pers. comm., 1996), who has kindly supplied updated estimates as presented in Table 1, Asia still holds about 37,530 to 48,180 wild elephants.

‘Domestic’, ‘domesticated’, or ‘captive’?

The man-elephant relationship is quite strange. While most of the domestic animals now most highly attuned to man (the dog, the cat, the water buffalo, etc.) have wild forebears which are largely untameable, many wild-caught elephants quickly and easily form intimate bonds with their keepers even though their wild temperament has never been modified through selective breeding. Some elephants form such warm and affectionate bonds with man as to deceive the observer into thinking that this animal must have been made truly domestic. Many other elephants in domesticity, however, remain unremittingly wild, hostile to man and ready to kill him at every chance. Clearly, a domesticated elephant is simply a wild animal in chains - but a wild animal frequently gentle and intelligent enough to be totally trustworthy as a baby-sitter to watch over human infants. What adjective best describes such animals when kept by man, particularly in relation to their wild congeners?

Consider the implications of the various terms that have been used for Elephas maximus in domesticity: tame elephant, work (or working) elephant, timber elephant, domestic elephant, domesticated elephant, and, lately in vogue, captive elephant. ‘Tame elephant’ can be discarded as vague and misleading, and ‘tame Asian elephant’ is ludicrous. Both ‘work’ elephant and ‘timber’ elephant are vague and applicable to only some animals. ‘Domestic’ elephant, ‘domesticated’ elephant, and ‘captive’ elephant all have more promise, as will be seen.

The dilemma of choosing an adjective might seem a trivial semantic quibble but the unavoidable decision necessitates making fundamental distinctions about the provenance of Asian elephants in domesticity and also about their genetic manipulation - or surprising lack thereof - at the hands of man.

· See “The history of domestication,” page 12.

Apart from science, words such as ‘captive’ or ‘domestic’ also have a totally separate meaning in the law of each elephant-keeping country. Cultural differences will also influence nomenclatural distinctions, and, in particular, Western ethics can clash with those of the East. The elephant, perceived as a long-treasured ‘household elephant’ in most Asian minds, might often be seen as an abused ‘captive elephant’ in contemporary Western eyes.

Clutton-Brock (1981) is eclectic but illuminating. Warning that the animals utilized by man cannot always be neatly categorized, she divides them into two primary groups: ‘man-made animals’ and ‘exploited captives’. She defines man-made animals as where the “livelihood and breeding of the animals is entirely under control and some, like certain breeds of dog, have been altered out of all recognition from the wild progenitor.” Clutton-Brock’s second group, the exploited captives (a curiously evocative turn of phrase), consists of wild animals which after capture are tamed or trained to some degree. Certainly both the “livelihood and breeding” of Asian elephants in captivity are potentially under absolute human control, but through thousands of years of keeping elephants, man’s inherent control over breeding has rarely been exercised, and never exercised selectively through a significant number of generations.¹ Many if not most domesticated elephants over all time have been either captured in the wild or sired by a wild bull and thus the elephant is an ‘exploited captive’. Clutton-Brock’s innovative terms do vividly illustrate a crucial distinction, but they are also unwieldy and unconventional.

Facing the same linguistic dilemma, Van Gelder (1969) terms Clutton-Brock’s ‘man-made animals’ as ‘domestic animals’ - a word often applied to elephants - and defines domestic animals, oversimplifying somewhat, as populations that are biologically or behaviorally different from their wild ancestors. The elephant as kept by man violates both stipulations. Biologically, elephants have never been subject to centuries, much less millennia, of selective breeding and genetic manipulation as have water buffalo, cattle, etc. Behaviorally, even when born in captivity, and even when born of two captive-born parents, elephants remain wild animals. There is no such thing as the ‘domestic elephant’. Van Gelder denotes Clutton-Brock’s ‘exploited captives’ to be ‘domesticated’ and stresses that being ‘domesticated’ is a process undergone by groups or by a population.

This book also will, somewhat unhappily, use the term ‘domesticated’ to refer to elephants held in domesticity, even though a complex and fundamental distinction hinges on an innocuous ‘-ed’. The ‘-ed’ is perhaps not so innocuous, however, if ‘domesticated’ is thought of as the past tense of an active verb, indicating that each individual elephant, whether captive-born or wild-caught, through all time has been forcibly subjected to breaking.

The author has often contemplated switching from ‘domesticated elephant’ to ‘captive elephant’, a term increasingly used in the West and with much justification. ‘Captive’ describes the elephants’ situation from both a physical and legal perspective, and ‘captive’ cries out their plight from an emotional perspective. (‘Domesticated’, by contrast, makes an often brutal relationship sound almost cosy.) But, tempting as it is, the term ‘captive’ chafes in two ways. First, ‘captive’ implies that all elephants held by man were caught in the wild when for thousands of years many elephants in Asia have been born in domesticity, and presently the ratio of domestic-born to wild-caught elephants is increasing in most countries; thus, to call the elephants kept by man in Asia ‘captive elephants’ is misleading and inaccurate. Second, while ‘captive elephant’ might be perfectly apt referring to an animal in a zoo in San Francisco or a circus in Moscow, the term seems contrived and opinionated, even judgmental, when applied to Asian traditions stretching back at least 4,000 years and possibly to the Palaeolithic.

As for a noun, ‘captivity’ would seem quite accurate to describe wild-caught elephants, but the rusty word ‘domesticity’ seems better for animals born of domesticated parents and thus also better for speaking of wild-caught and domestic-born animals collectively.

The period covered

This book is conceptually the middle section of a larger unwritten work, a three-volume series comprehensively overviewing the management of the domesticated Asian elephant: (I) The Past: History, culture, and keeping technique; (II) The Present: Status and problems by country; and (III) The Future: Management and solutions. In this scheme, the current book is the second volume, the present, written out of sequence so as to respond to the grave problems threatening domesticated Asian elephants.

By ‘the present’ is meant roughly the coming to Asia of colonialism, international mercantilism, and modern technology - the roots of today’s ‘globalization’. References to earlier, pre-1850 times are sparse except for information which strongly illuminates issues still important today. (In any case, social history, into which this book occasionally wanders, is far more important than the conventional history of names and dates.) Coverage becomes reasonably complete around World War II. This book discusses the future only briefly and even then only to point out looming problems unavoidable over the short term, about twenty years or the time a calf born today will take to reach maturity.

Legal status and jurisdiction of elephants

The Asian elephant, Elephas maximus, is listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Eight Asian countries with wild elephants have ratified CITES: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. (Of course, as Bari [1992] wrote, “Listing a species in Appendix I of CITES alone offers no guarantee to ensure its long term survival in the field.”) The legal status of wild elephants is quite straightforward everywhere; unfortunately, the legal status of domesticated elephants is often quite ambiguous.

Consider the current legal status of animals such as the various pigs in the genus Sus, the cattle in the genus Bos, or the buffalo in the genus Bubalus. All three of these genera have both clearly defined wild species and clearly defined domestic breeds. Thus, in management, wild species such as Sus salvanius (pygmy hog) or Bos gaurus (gaur) or Bubalus bubalis (wild buffalo) automatically fall under the jurisdiction of wildlife departments, while the Taihu pig, the Zebu cow, and the 57 endangered breeds of domestic buffalo become the ward of livestock or animal husbandry departments. But while wild specimens of Elephas maximus fall clearly to the wildlife camp and thus get complete legal protection, the domesticated elephant gets no protector because of its nebulous and confusing status as a wild species never domesticated - that is, never made a true domestic animal - even though kept in domesticity for millennia.

Individual wildlife biologists are invariably sympathetic, but national wildlife agencies universally (except perhaps Myanmar) consider the domesticated Asian elephant to be just another domestic animal and thus none of their business - even in countries where the domesticated elephant is legally classified as wild and the wildlife agency has been given jurisdiction. Livestock departments generally consider the domesticated elephant to be a wild animal, an exotic remnant of the past with no commercial value and thus unworthy of their attention. (The more developed a country is, the more staunchly is the elephant excluded; only in Myanmar and Lao PDR are livestock departments genuinely interested in domesticated elephants.) Forestry institutions and foresters happily acknowledge a great historical debt but then quite correctly conclude that protecting or managing domesticated elephant populations is not their job. In the end, caring for privately-owned domesticated Asian elephants in most countries turns out to be nobody’s job, usually for reasons of how law assigns jurisdiction.

Interrelationship of wild and domesticated elephants

The line between wild and domesticated elephants initially seems very distinct. This commonly perceived schism is bolstered because Elephas maximus in the hands of man superficially resembles the situation of the true domestic animals. But the true domestic animals have through man’s artifices widely diverged genetically from their wild ancestor, while the domesticated elephant has never been selectively bred and thus both genetically and behaviorally remains a wild elephant. Too many conservationists intellectually well aware of this distinction persist in drawing a fundamental but false division between wild and domesticated Asian elephants. Lair (1982) said, “We can no longer afford to look at wild and domestic elephants as two distinct populations; the relationship of wild and domestic elephants must increasingly be seen as a synergistic or interdependent relationship.” The interface between what are really two subpopulations is surprisingly porous.

Releasability

Asia’s 16,000 domesticated elephants possess an unusual degree of ‘releasability’. If set free into appropriate wild habitat, many domesticated elephants in Asia would survive (probably over two out of three, although nobody can say for sure), and thus Elephas maximus is a superb candidate for release. Beyond mere survival, most released elephants would integrate with wild elephants and many would ultimately breed. Released in the absence of wild elephants, well-selected groups of domesticated elephants would quickly form viable feral communities which after a generation or two of cleansing man-inflicted traits would behaviorally become genuine wild elephants.

A large majority of Asia’s 16,000 domesticated elephants are freed daily to feed in nature, their movement restricted only by hobbles or a tether chain. Most domesticated elephants therefore closely approach wild elephants in physical fitness, understanding of terrain, and knowledge of food types and where to find them. Domesticated elephants need neither to be psychologically acclimatized to the forest nor physically acclimatized to steep hillsides; they do not need to be taught how to avoid poisonous plants or how to use their trunks to gather their own food. (If domesticated elephants have any man-inflicted lack compared to wild elephants, it is neither physical ability nor understanding of environment but rather poor social skills: mothering, leading, mating, etc.) Such a high degree of pre-adaptation to the wild is unusual for a large mammal and holds enormous potential in future wildlife management.

Wild-to-domesticated transfer

Great numbers of wild elephants have been captured to enter domesticity for, let us assume, at least 4,000 years. Perhaps over 100,000 wild elephants were captured in the last century and perhaps two to four million animals have been captured throughout the history of domestication (Sukumar, 1992).

Recruitment from the wild subpopulation is not limited to captive animals but also includes transferred germ plasma from wild bulls covering domesticated cows. In India and Sri Lanka calves sired by wild bulls have constituted virtually the only captive births. Sometimes in the past the ‘recruitment’ of wild gametes reached immense proportions. Of Burma’s pre-colonial past, O’Connor (1907) wrote, “The King owned a thousand elephants of whom the males were thoroughly broken to service; the females were kept in a half wild state on the borders of the elephant forests, where they were visited by their wild neighbours.” O’Connor was too much of a gentleman to point out that most visiting “wild neighbours” were breeding bulls. Similar semi-managed breeding systems were found in Thailand and, indeed, across the continent.

Clearly, the wild-to-domesticated elephant transfer, both as animals and as gametes, has been extensive and is well documented and understood. The transfer of animals and gametes in the opposite direction, from domesticity to the wild, is poorly understood; indeed, it has never been discussed in any depth.

Domesticated-to-wild transfer

Casual thought and cursory examination of the historical record suggest that, apart from a few escapees, domesticated elephants do not become wild elephants. Further reading and thought, however, show that the interchange between the two subpopulations is far more bi-directional than first appears. The most obvious domesticated-to-wild transfer is the fairly frequent occurrence of domesticated elephants which have slipped or broken their chains, or perhaps killed their mahout, to escape into the wild. But beyond such ‘accidental releases’, owners must also for millennia have intentionally released individual elephants into the wild for many reasons: retirement, a temporary illness mistaken for a wasting disease, a work-preventing injury in an otherwise healthy elephant, being fundamentally uncontrollable, etc. (In Thailand a few years ago, a wild elephant named Nga Ngorn, famous for killing two visitors to Khao Yai National Park, was almost surely a released domesticated elephant, probably set free for being uncontrollable.)

Release at the end of a working life, whether for age or injury, must have been an extremely common form of retirement in bygone days. Cultural prohibitions against elephant meat and the waste of a man’s valuable time tending unproductive elephants made release the common sense answer for unwanted animals. (As late as the mid-19th century, as suggested by data in Table 25, page 258, Thailand might have had one domesticated elephant for every fifty people, probably producing a perennial shortage of mahouts). The literature mentions but few such releases, probably because to liberate unproductive elephants was such an everyday event as to be beneath notice. In times of low human numbers and vast wilderness, much of it abundant with wild elephants, the freeing of a retired or injured elephant was surely much easier than in today’s cramped environment. Speculating on the man-elephant relationship in earlier days, Olivier (1978a) says “it must have been much easier to find and capture elephants than today, and thus by positive feedback a cultural relationship with elephants grew....” If finding and capturing elephants was easier then than now, releasing unwanted animals must also have been easier, a totally natural thing to do.

Mass or group releases have also long been common. In what is now Thailand, for example, in order to save manpower and money the kingdom of Ayutthaya in times of peace released many of its war elephants, probably particularly transport animals, into forests holding wild elephants; the released animals were recaptured (along with, it must be presumed, their offspring) only when war broke out. Giles (1930a) wrote, “In central Siam, especially in the circles of Prachin and Ayudhya, where not many years back one would frequently meet herds of semi-wild elephants browsing on the trees and bushes and eating the paddy-crop, hardly an animal is to be met with today. These semi-wild animals were those which came under the control of the Royal Elephant Department [krom kochabal] and were driven to the great elephant kraal at Ayudhya on the occasion of a royal drive or hunt.”Royal elephant parks (gajavana) in India were seemingly run along similar lines of ‘periodic release’ and, indeed, they might even have been the model for the Thai system.

Another frequent motive for mass releases was in times of war to deny the use of one’s elephants to an enemy, much like spiking cannon or releasing cavalry horses. Olivier (1978a) writes that “ancient kingdoms would attempt to capture the tame stocks of enemies, or accept them as tributes....” But many defeated enemies would have freed their elephants in preference to watching the victor enjoy their use; as late as World War II many elephants in Burma were set free as the only alternative to confiscation by the British or, most often, the Japanese. In an unusual - although unusual perhaps only because of place - mass release in the 1930s, the Andaman islands of India suddenly gained a wild population (or, perhaps more accurately, a feral population of wild elephants, given the elephant’s genetic composition) when a bankrupt Japanese timber firm freed its elephants.

Releases, both individual and mass, might seem to belong to history and releases undoubtedly were far more common in the past, but intentional releases continue to this day. Over the past few years one province of northern Thailand is said to have had 20 or 30 domesticated elephants released haphazardly into the wild by owners who could no longer make a living from them, could no longer afford to keep them, and could not find buyers for them.

The best-placed observer of illegal logging in northern Thailand, a veterinarian, predicts that within five or six years all of the valuable trees will have been extracted, creating a loss of work which will provoke so many individual releases of unemployable and unsellable elephants as to collectively constitute a mass release. Recently in Thailand there has even been considerablle talk in official circles of group releases of retired, injured, unemployable, or otherwise elephants.

Although much less common than wild elephants mating with domesticated elephants, domesticated elephants do sometimes genetically infiltrate the wild population through breeding. One observer {Mukherjee, 1995} says that in West Bengal and other parts of northeast India, mahouts will sometimes release hobbled domesticated bulls to mate with wild cows, the mahouts’ motive being to allow their charge to relieve tension. Dr. Khyne U Mar (Pers. comm., 1996) says that there are domesticated bulls in Myanmar which, frustrated by the many non-cycling domesticated cows, chase after wild cows; many of these wayward bulls are never recaptured.

In the terai of Nepal not long ago a domesticated bull, Ganesha, was released into the wild upon his owner’s death (Dhungel et al., 1990). Despite destroying property and causing “even a few human deaths,” Ganesha was seen as a “deity” by local villagers. Ganesha proved to be a superb breeder. Regularly visiting the Koshi Tappu elephant camp, he had sired seven calves as of 1988. Assume for the sake of argument that Ganesha, as is the norm in Nepal, was purchased in northeast India, where nearly all domesticated elephants have been captured in the wild. If so, Ganesha would have been born a wild elephant, then domesticated, then released back to the wild - from where he sired calves born in domesticity. (Given his success with domesticated cows, he is likely to have covered wild cows as well.)

Clearly, there is not a simple one-way door between the wild and domesticated subpopulations but rather an osmosis which normally draws wild elephants into domesticity but under certain conditions allows significant flow into the wild. Domesticated-to-wild elephant transfers clearly did not create a seething cauldron of mixing genes, but rather a very slowly simmering kettle. Domesticated-to-wild transfers rarely compare in scope with those in the reverse direction, but if there is any validity to the wildlife management technique of managed introduction (inserting a few animals, usually males, to enhance genetic diversity in a pocketed population), then a modest but steady influx of ‘foreign genes’ from released domesticated elephants must have significantly influenced some wild populations, perhaps even imparting a degree of hybrid vigor.

The crossing of domesticated elephants back into the wild is not radical theory but rather the less common direction of a two-way interchange which illustrates that biologically, and even practically if managers so choose, wild and domesticated elephants are two subpopulations of a single species. (Nonetheless, to use ‘subpopulation’ at every turn soon becomes awkward; the terms ‘wild population’ and ‘domesticated population’ are normally used henceforth.)

Accepting Sukumar’s (1992) assumption of between two and four million wild elephants captured since the dawn of elephant keeping, there must surely have been significant trickle-back into the wild. Man has unintentionally and unknowingly been genetically manipulating some regional wild populations for thousands of years. The fact that releases followed by breeding have occurred regularly in significant numbers over much time is beyond dispute; the only question is the degree of genetic impact on wild elephants - and, equally intriguing, the distance over which that impact might have spread.

Distance of transfer

Elephants are extremely mobile creatures, and wild-caught elephants are invariably moved a considerable distance from the capture site. How far might genetic influene have spread?

Elephants, often in great numbers, have for thousands of years been sent great distances all over Asia, including to many areas rich with wild elephants. (An excellent source for information on early trade is Digby [1971].) The purely commercial trade was vast, gifting elephants in diplomacy was common, and warfare was rife. Innumerable specific examples could be given, but let a few suffice. Alexander on his return to Europe took along many domesticated elephants from the Indian subcontinent, passing through now defunct wild elephant populations in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Kublai Khan, the founder of the Mongol dynasty in China, was said to have 5,000 elephants, and many of them travelled far. Ceylon’s fine elephants have been a valuable commodity exported for over 2,000 years; Kurt (1969) speaks of exports as early as the 6th century BC, and Digby (1971) of exports in the 3rd century BC. Jayewardene (1994c) says, “Records show that even though Sri Lanka was exporting a large number of elephants in the 5th and 6th century BC, a number of elephants were also imported into the country after the 4th century BC.”

A few centuries ago, according to Olivier (1978a), there appear to have been three main centers for capturing and then selling wild elephants - Bengal, Ceylon, and Pegu (lower Burma) - and “this complex trade in elephants was set up very early on.” He adds that the centers, beyond “trading from their own abundant wild stocks, also imported animals for resale from similar centres elsewhere.” Those “similar centres elsewhere” must have included many elephant entrepots further to the east and, far back in time, to the west nearly reaching the Mediterranean.

Many translocated domesticated elephants, some wild-caught and some captive-born, must have escaped or been released far from their place of birth. Many translocated elephants must subsequently have bred with local wild elephants. The impact of translocated elephants breeding with local populations, both domesticated and wild, would have been all out of proportion to their numbers because of the criteria used to choose them in their place of origin.

Sending old or inferior elephants over great distances at great expense makes little sense, so nearly all elephants sold or gifted far away would have been young, fit, and handsome. Only exceptional animals were sent expensively by ship, and probably even elephants sent overland were far above average. Most were probably young adult males, valued highly everywhere for their strength and their beauty, and nearly all gifts would have been tuskers since to send a cow or mukhna could easily be seen as an insult. (In Sri Lanka, some tuskers might even have been imported specifically to be released in the hope of passing their tusk-bearing qualities to the largely tuskless wild bulls.) Given their youth and superior physical qualities, an unnaturally large number of bulls sent far from home must have been good breeders. Bulls are able to cover more cows than cows are able to drop calves, another reason that any released or escaped translocated elephants would have bred with disproportionate effect. As time passed, some of the translocated elephants would increasingly have included not just a single local genotype but rather a mix, for example a tusker sired by a Cambodian bull out of a dam from northern Thailand being sent as a royal gift to Sri Lanka.

The movement of wild elephants at the hand of man to breed far from home is quite unusual in the breeding history of a wild species. While domestic dogs and water buffalo, for example, have often been moved at the hands of man and some have perhaps then bred with their wild progenitors at the new location, the moved dogs and buffalo were normally long-domesticated lineages. Translocated elephants, however, were and are wild animals. Wild elephants were moved by man thousands of kilometers, sometimes to mate with local wild elephants and perhaps even with a different subspecies. (A similar situation has ocurred with reindeer and a few other species but never over such great distances.) For millennia man has been unwittingly and unintentionally influencing the genetics of wild elephants over considerable distances.

The genetic impact on wild elephants of human-engineered releases of relocated domesticated elephants, both accidental and intentional, both as individuals and groups, is difficult to quantify. Probably the only way to put the question on a scientific footing would be for an historian, a geneticist, and a population biologist to identify the critical parameters in their own disciplines, correlate them, and then construct computer models in order to explore the variables of those parameters.

The role of domesticated elephants in wild elephant conservation

The impact of wild elephant populations on domesticated elephant populations is obvious; wild elephants have for millennia provided a bounteous supply of captives, and wild elephants have sired many calves born in captivity. But, from a conservation point of view, what practical effects do domesticated elephants in Asia presently have on the management of wild elephants? At first glance, the answer would seem to be no effect at all, and in the past this was largely true. Looking to the future, however, there are new practices and many traditional management practices which could maximize the benefits which domesticated elephants pose for wild populations.

The following potential benefits to wild elephants from well-managed domesticated populations are not original to the author but rather represent a body of collective wisdom culled from the literature. Most of these benefits are discussed extensively in the country profiles, and sources are cited there. (To cite even one source below would mean having to cite all, which would obfuscate the clarity of the following list.) The benefits that domesticated elephants could provide to wild elephants are that:

1. Domesticated elephant populations are everywhere in Asia the final refuge for wild elephants in situations where they can no longer be tolerated or no longer survive in nature.

2. Domesticated elephant populations are indigenous captive breeding programs which, despite being almost totally unmanaged, regularly produce many elephants pre-adapted for release into the wild:

a. to bolster declining wild groups or those with a sexual imbalance.

b. to reintroduce elephants in areas where they have been extirpated.

c. to by means of managed immigration ‘insert’ outside genes into pocketed wild groups faced with inbreeding.

3. Domesticated elephants trained to control other elephants, presently under-utilized, are invaluable in relocating wild elephants and in capturing and training them for wildlife management purposes: saving doomed elephants, placating local opinion, clearing for unavoidable development, etc.

4. Domesticated elephants employed at skidding in selective logging operations obviate the need to build roads and thus protect the environment of the wild elephant and, indeed, all other species.

5. Domesticated elephant populations which produce significant numbers of calves eliminate or greatly reduce pressure to reinstate legal capture of wild elephants for commercial purposes.

6. Domesticated elephants, when strictly registered and visibly marked as individuals, discourage illegal capture and trade of wild elephants by minimizing sales of captives into the legal domesticated population.

7. Domesticated elephants can serve as a platform for hands-on research directly benefiting the conservation of wild elephants. Reproductive biology and the determination of subspecies are the most obvious spheres of research, but others include inventing a contraceptive-implanting dart to be used in the control wild birth rates, developing the use of voice prints to identify and monitor individual wild elephants, etc.

8. Domesticated elephants already play valuable though unplanned roles in education and ‘public relations’ on behalf of their wild cousins; these roles could be expanded with careful planning.

Well-managed domesticated populations are of inestimable value to the wildlife conservation community, and their importance can only grow exponentially as wild elephant populations continue to decline. The larger wildlife conservation community should assess the worth of these many benefits and consider greater participation in the management of domesticated elephants.

The literature on domesticated elephants

The preface to an early but still important book on elephant care, Elephants and Their Diseases (Evans, 1910), states, “The scantiness of the literature on the subject is, I am aware, a source of embarrassment to those in charge of these valuable animals and the need for someguide embodying the latest information has been widely felt.” Eighty-five years later, the pressures on Asia’s domesticated elephants have increased exponentially but the modern management literature is still “a source of embarrassment,” except for a rich veterinary literature and bountiful writings on elephants in Western zoos. Since Evans’s fine book, only one single work, Ferrier’s 1947 The Care and Management of Elephants in Burma, has been published on the practical keeping and management of Asian elephants on their home continent. (Gale’s classic 1974 Burmese Timber Elephant contains a good overview on both wild and domesticated elephants.) Standard reference works on care abound for the true domestic animals such as swine, cattle, poultry and even for commercially-farmed wild species such as musk deer or ostriches, but even the most diligent researcher will come up nearly empty-handed when assembling the basic works on domesticated elephants. Even the domestic yak got a book unto itself, The Yak, an excellent overview by Li and Wiener (1995), before the Asian elephant did. Of the use of elephants in forestry, two brief FAO publications (Jayasekara and Atapattu, 1995; Anon., 1974) are very good, but they are intended to brief outsiders, not to teach new skills to working elephant managers.

The absence of comprehensive, practical publications relevant to care and use in Asia - whether in logging, animal husbandry, veterinary medicine, or conservation - is distinctly odd considering that the elephant is the largest living land animal, has long been known and loved across the globe, and the Asian elephant has for millennia played an eminent role in human culture including two of the world’s great religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. The Asian elephant has until recently also been invaluable to man as a work animal and money-earner, and therein lies the likeliest explanation for the huge gaps in the professional literature. A precipitous decline in the use of elephants in transport and logging has quickly stripped them of their once enormous economic value, and consequently there has been no perceived need for books on managing elephants. A more charitable explanation for the lack of publications might be that extreme cultural differences between keepers cause management systems for elephants to vary with location far more than do keeping systems for the true domestic animals, thus rendering impossible any book of universal applicability.

Nowhere is the paucity of literature more regretted than in anthropology. Many if not most domesticated elephants in Asia are ridden by tribals and many elephants are owned by tribals, but published knowledge of tribal keeping is comprised of a few tantalizing snippets written mostly by non-anthropologists, nearly all veterinarians, foresters, or wildlife biologists. No anthropologist has ever studied and systematically described the elephant-keeping aspects of a single tribe or society in Asia. (See “The tribal traditions,” page 19, for the use of the problematic word ‘tribe’.)

The following country profiles comprise a fairly comprehensive review of the English-language scientific and management literature, directing readers to all primary sources and most secondary ones. (Indeed, many sources have been ‘squeezed’ of most or all of the hard information they contain.) All documents of worth accessible to the author have been cited, often with a brief attempt to indicate their usefulness.

Little general background on elephants is provided because given the expert audience intended it is assumed that most readers will be reasonably familiar with the elephant’s life history, size, food requirements, breeding biology, etc. Supplying background could easily double the size of the present work. Some excellent general works are recommended in a footnote.² The most useful background books for a particular country are briefly ‘reviewed’ in the last paragraph of that country profile’s introduction; books specific to a given a subject are recommended under that subject.

Supplementary sources

Newspapers and popular periodicals have been consulted and quoted to an unusual extent for a work on management. (Only stories with a byline have been cited.) The popular press is usually the only source of information about topical events such as mahouts killed by elephants, musth bulls being killed by police, etc., and the press is often the only window for monitoring substantive issues such as the activities of NGOs, campaigns to change law, etc. The author’s guidelines for using newspaper sources have been that the story must be noted as such, must appear well-researched, must be consistent with other sources, and if controversial should be corroborated by a human source such as an elephant expert, an official, a villager, etc.

Interviews were conducted with academics, veterinarians, wildlife biologists, and other professionals. In the text interviews are indicated by giving the person’s name or the year of the interview in italic braces, e. g., {Smith, 1996} or Ghosh {1996}; a list of people interviewed is given in Appendix 1. Much valuable evidence, especially for Thailand, has come from mahouts and elephant owners, the best source of information on illegal capture and trade, prices, preferences for elephants by sex and age, etc. Interviews disguised as casual conservation are the only way to uncover such elusive issues such as the morale of tribal mahouts or the attitudes of the youngest generation of mahouts.

Domesticated elephants

Conventional wisdom has it that the Asian elephant was first domesticated 4,000 or more years ago by the Harappan culture at Mohenjo-Daro (in present day Pakistan), and the figure of 4,000 years will henceforth be frequently used as a convenient shorthand to evoke the great antiquity of elephant keeping. “The received view is that the earliest evidence of elephants in captivity comes from the Harappan seals which show elephants with ropes on them,” says Lahiri-Choudhuri (1995); he believes, however, that since no seal or image shows a rider, the seals prove only that elephants were kept captive, not that they were trained or “domesticated.”

Conventional wisdom often implies but rarely specifically states that the art and science of elephant-keeping diffused throughout the continent from a center in northwest India. Undoubtedly, a great cultural dissemination spread from that area, radiating ever wider with the rise of aristocratic elephant-keeping cultures across the subcontinent - but that center was not neccessarily the source of the first domestication.

The history of domestication

Both the time and the place of the first domestication of elephants remain totally open to debate. Gould (1991) writes, “Stories about beginnings come in only two basic modes. An entity either has an explicit point of origin, a specific time and place of creation, or else it evolves and has no definable moment of entry to the world.”

The place of the first domestication is unclear because Mohenjo-Daro clearly fails to qualify as, to use Gould’s term, “an explicit point of origin.” The evidence for Mohenjo-Daro itself is very scant, so the lack of physical evidence elsewhere does not prove that elephant keeping did not exist anywhere else. Olivier (1978a), referring to Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam - “a baffling melting pot of languages and culture” - writes that “historical sources indicated that the elephant has been known, caught, and used for almost as long in this region as it has in India, although McNeely ... suggests that this only began with the advent of Hindu influences.” Domestication might well have been found in many places 4,000 years ago, not just Mohenjo-Daro.

As for the time of first domestication, Mohenjo-Daro is clearly not a “definable moment of entry.” Lahiri-Choudhuri (1995) believes that the keeping of elephants in captivity in India might stretch back “up to 8,000 years or so.” The first keeping of elephants was undoubtedly in the Palaeolithic when a lost or orphaned calf attached itself to a tribe of hunters; young elephant calves have no instinctive fear of man and are well known for seeking out humans if bereft of elephant society. The question is really how one defines ‘domestication’. How many elephants must be kept over what period of time before qualifying as true domestication? Does casually keeping an elephant or two permanently at the edge of camp constitute domestication? Is performance of work a criterion? Is breeding good numbers of calves a criterion? (If so, Sri Lanka and India have failed to this day.) Is selective breeding a criterion? (If so, then to this day the elephant has never been domesticated in the conventional sense.)

From a biological perspective the Asian elephant is a wild animal that has never been made a domestic animal even though for thousands of years millions of elephants have as individuals been forcibly domesticated (or been born to such animals). Given such an ancient history, it is quite amazing that there was never any significant selective breeding.

The time, place, and nature of the first domestication are all fascinating armchair puzzles. Although ultimately unanswerable, reflection on these conundrums is not purely intellectual because these questions stimulate productive thought about human nature, elephant nature, and the tumultuous confluence of the two.

The animal

In many aspects the Asian elephant is a fairly normal domestic herbivore: a slow but good breeder, not fussy about food, and not particularly high strung, although many adult males do require considerable skill in handling, much like domestic horses or bovines. Unusual complications, however, are posed by the fact that the elephant is the world’s largest living land mammal, with the Asian elephant closely following the African elephant, particularly in terms of weight.

Physical attributes

Beyond sheer size, still other unique physiological characteristics differentiate the elephant from other herbivores. The elephant lives longer than any mammal other than man. (Elephants in domesticity consequently have a very long working life, but only at the expense of a very slow growth to working age.) The elephant has the longest mammalian gestation period, 21-22 months, and a very long reproductive span, with some cows calving even past sixty years.

As a serious thought experiment combining animal biology and human sociology, suppose that the horse grew until aged twenty or even twenty-five and weighed three to five tons at maturity. Further, suppose that you could not use a horse for transport or put it to plow or breed it until it was at least fifteen years old. With such a daunting life history, would an elephant-sized horse have ever attained the eminent world-wide role which the horse has played in transportation, warfare, and agriculture? Would a giant, slow-breeding water buffalo or ox have ever transformed Southeast Asian agriculture? Clearly not, and this mental exercise demonstrates just how odd an animal is the elephant - and the biological oddities pose only half of the difficulties of keeping elephants.

Temperament

Beyond the purely physical challenges, suppose those hypothetical giant horses or oxen or water buffalo were either wild-caught or direct descendants of wild-caught animals and totally retained their natural wild temperament. If about one out of three animals was a potential killer, would a giant horse (or ox or water buffalo) have proved as widely useful as the docile, normal-sized horse has through centuries? Would people continue to keep dogs as pets and work animals if every third dog steadfastly retained a thoroughly ‘vicious’, wolf-like demeanour? Clearly not.

The elephant is, when it chooses, an exceedingly dangerous animal. In North America more zoo and circus keepers are killed annually by elephants than by all other animals combined, a great irony considering that the public usually sees the elephant as a placid, kindly herbivore. Most man-killing elephants are bulls but there are too many dangerous cows to automatically assume benignity. (Indeed, even some calves are aggressive from infancy and outright dangerous at the age of three or four.)

Far quicker than its bulk would seem to allow, the elephant can kill with its tusks, its forehead, its trunk (either by striking or lifting and throwing), its mouth (by biting, a favorite of cows), its legs (by stomping or kicking), or any combination thereof. Kicks come in astonishing variety with both the front and back legs able to kick away from or into the body, the latter a perfect prelude for yet more kicking under the belly. A killing attack often comes as a combination of charging, kicking, and head-butting so fast and so coordinated that the three components are inseparable to the eye. The domesticated elephant, thoroughly accustomed to man’s presence, is particularly adept.

In everyday management, elephants fall into three classes: some are never dangerous, some are dangerous only under very specific circumstances (in the mahout’s absence, around trains, in water, etc.), and some are dangerous all of the time. The proportions of the classes within a group will vary somewhat according to sex-and-age structure and the quality of training, but considering every third elephant to be dangerous is a very healthy way of thinking.

The first concomitant of keeping elephants is that human deaths are unavoidable. The second concomitant of keeping elephants is that, beyond physical prowess, profound knowledge is needed to control dangerous elephants, and no amount of raw courage can replace knowledge for very long. The masterly skills so long taken for granted in Asia are vanishing rapidly and that loss will leave in its wake many dead mahouts and many dead elephants shot as uncontrollable for lack of a master mahout. Traditional skills are lost very easily, but the elephant’s essential temperament will not change.

The scientific world greatly frowns on anthropomorphizing, the unobjective belief that animals, particularly wild animals, have emotions or personalities. Nonetheless, elephants have certain characteristics which sorely tempt one into so thinking. Like the primates (including man) and the cetaceans, elephants have brains which are small at birth and a long time growing, a pattern usually interpreted as indicating high intelligence and a complex social life. Elephants maintain a sense of play even as adults, a rare quality; Moss (1988), upon watching rollicking African elephants, wrote in her notes: “How can one do a serious study of animals that behave this way?” Haynes (1991), an archaeologist attempting to use the behavior and ecology of today’s Asian and African elephants to try to clarify the lives of extinct mammoths and mastodonts, says, “Elephants teach each other by behavioral example and directed communicated messages.... Elephants make a wide variety of vocalizations to communicate mood, intent, and desire.” Many scientists would have it that elephants have altruistic feelings, and some scientists have gone so far as to suggest that this altruism sometimes extends beyond elephants to other species. Clearly, keeping elephants is qualitatively different from keeping conventional domestic animals not just because of their unique physical characteristics but also because of their high intelligence.

For describing true domestic animals, the word ‘temperament’ is allowable when speaking either of behavioral traits presumed common to a breed or the typical behavior of a specific dog or horse, etc. When used with people, ‘temperament’ clearly implies the nature of an individual personality. Perhaps the word is inappropriate for domesticated elephants, which are true wild animals, but somehow ‘temperament’ remains the most fitting word to describe what makes the behavior of one domesticated elephant different from any other.

For a manager forced to decide which mahout will ride which elephant or which bull will mate a skittish cow, elephants clearly do have individual temperaments or personalities. Whenever elephant keepers, whether Asians or Westerners, swap elephant stories they will find an elephant equivalent for everything from the holiest saint to an ax murderer, whether in their behavior towards humans or even, as is often forgotten, towards other elephants. The wise manager tries to match the unique behavior of each elephant to each mahout. Assigning the wrong rider can ruin a good elephant, and putting the wrong mahout atop the wrong elephant can easily get him killed. Illustrating just how complex can be the interaction of human temperament and elephant temperament, Evans (1910) wrote: “I have known the training of a previously well-behaved animal to be lost to such a degree that she would endure neither load nor rider, simply owing to the accident of being placed in the charge of an irascible, fitful keeper, who first negligently indulged, and then wantonly punished her.”

The keepers

By ‘keepers’ is meant both mahouts and owners. Owners, through orders to their hired mahouts, have great direct effect on elephants by controlling food, scheduling work, etc. The following discussion examines the keepers from numerous perspectives which influence management.

Mahoutship (I)

The neologism ‘mahoutship’ is intended to be the exact equivalent of ‘horsemanship’ and to carry all of that word’s hoary connotations.³ Just as with horsemanship, the word ‘mahoutship’ implies that not only does the rider possess great physical skill but he also has extensive transmitted technical knowledge and, in a traditional culture, even a powerful spiritual or magical component.

‘Mahoutship’ is a badly needed word because a disastrous decline in the quality of mahouts in nearly every country forces much discussion of a loss of capability, and no existing word or phrase (‘the level of skill of mahouts’ comes closest) serves nearly as well as mahoutship. Asia’s traditional mahouts richly deserve such an evocative word because the continent possesses traditions as varied and skilful as any of the world’s great horse-keeping societies: the gauchos of South America, the native Americans, the Mongols, etc.

Mahoutship, like horsemanship, implies superb athletic ability. Most Asian mahouts, and certainly all those who ride dangerous elephants, are superbly conditioned athletes able to move around or on top of elephants with the skills of an Olympic gymnast. Physical prowess is absolutely fundamental to keeping dangerous elephants in traditional societies which lack the hydraulic doors and elephant-proof walls of the West.

The mahout’s perception of self

Most Westerners nurse a serious misunderstanding of the fundamental mind set of mahouts, at least today’s mahouts in the more developed Asian countries. Inspired by Kipling stories, Sabu films, and the myth of the boy and the calf who spend their whole lives together, Westerners tend to lionize the mahout. Swayed by their own respect, Western researchers often assume that mahouts must naturally take pride in their job and their skills.

Pride of profession was undoubtedly typical in traditional societies. It is easy to imagine the pride of a mahout in the royal elephant corps or a tribal lad nonchalantly riding a dangerous tusker through the village, hoping to be noticed by all the girls. This might be the stuff of movies, but it is also the stuff of life; unfortunately, such a sense of self-worth survives poorly in rapidly developing countries. Whatever self-esteem remains is felt only within the mahout’s own peer group, family, or tribe, and even that pride is diminishing as traditional communities wither away. Today’s mahouts, unlike their elephants, receive no respect or appreciation from the larger society. One goal of a recent mahout training course in Kerala was, according to Walker and Cheeran (1996), “to upgrade the image of mahouts and the profession of mahout both in their own eyes, that of their owners [employers], and the public.”

Feelings of resentment, inferiority, and isolation dominate in modernizing Asia, and there are many reasons for such self-deprecation. Economically, nearly all mahouts are disadvantaged and many are genuinely downtrodden. Socially, Asian societies accord great theoretical respect to the elephant but very little to the mahout, who remains a sort of invisible man. (Asia’s mahouts have not been and never will be glamorized and institutionalized as was the North American cowboy.) Beyond contemporary prejudices, all across Asia there also lingers the deeply buried and ancient contempt of the agriculturist for the herder, the mahout being seen as an uneducated fellow who works with animals. If the mahout should also happen to be a tribal, as so many are, the feeling of inferiority is compounded.

A Thai mahout known by the author is famous for his ability to capture musth bulls run amok, a task he accomplishes through skill and physical prowess but also, it is believed, through ‘charisma’ (baramii) or a powerful mental domination over the elephant. This master mahout paradoxically has a very low opinion of his own status in the larger society and genuinely believes that anyone who drives a motor vehicle professionally is his social superior. Less anecdotally, the results of an informal poll conducted in Thailand amongst nearly 200 civil service mahouts, mostly sons of mahouts, showed that not a single man wanted his own sons to follow in his footsteps and not a single son intended to do so.

Grasping an understanding of the mahout’s negative image of self is important in Thailand and possibly even more important in Sri Lanka and much of south and north India, where caste often compounds the alienation. Any elephant manager in a post-traditional society must be aware of such demoralisation before truly understanding what motivates many mahouts.

A mahout’s view of self invariably influences his view of his elephant. In particular, hired mahouts with no natural or culturally-inculcated affection for elephants all too often see their elephant as the cause of their woes and treat it accordingly. Outright cruelty is rare but indifference is rife, and indifference leads to unhealthy, poorly nourished elephants.

Management perspectives on the keepers

When looking at elephant management, whether past or present, there are three primary perspectives on groups of keepers: the institutional, the socio-economic, and the cultural. The following discussion is quite general with relatively few citations and examples, but many specific instances are given and analyzed in the country profiles, particularly in “Ownership,” “Mahoutship,” and “Cultural dimensions.”

The institutional perspective

The simplest analytical perspective on keepers from a contemporary management point of view at present is whether a domesticated elephant is owned by the state or by a private party. All of Asia’s largest elephant-keeping countries have two domesticated subpopulations, privately-owned elephants and government-owned elephants (mainly belonging to forest departments or similar state enterprises). In terms of improving or reforming management, the two institutional subpopulations have quite different needs.

· See Table 3, page 27, for data on private and government ownership.

Government-owned elephants

Government-owned elephants, which constitute approximately 20% of the total Asian population, are found in Myanmar (about 2,900), Indonesia (about 600), India (unknown, but perhaps 200), Thailand (about 80), Sri Lanka (60), and a very few in Bangladesh and Nepal. Government-owned elephants until recently worked primarily in forestry, but lately in Thailand and parts of south India many forestry elephants have been put to work in tourism and entertainment, the last alternative of a logging industry lost to deforestation. In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the government-owned elephants perform no labor at all except for minor work in tourism and, in Indonesia, a few experiments in skidding logs.

Government-owned logging elephants are generally well cared for and protected, although often there will be some pressure to overwork, as in Myanmar, or problems with diet, as in Sri Lanka. Most government elephants get excellent veterinary care, and they are very rarely sold. Even where problems exist, government elephants are under central management and therefore reform programs should be easy to implement. Across the continent, the biggest management problem with government-owned elephants is a low birth rate, and improved breeding is easy to achieve - at least from a biological point of view.

Privately-owned elephants

Privately-owned elephants, on the other hand, are throughout Asia almost totally neglected from a management perspective even though they constitute 80% of the continent’s population. Lair (1986) identified and discussed eleven areas in which many if not most privately-owned elephants fare worse than government-owned elephants: manageability, legal status and registration, identification and documentation, overwork and abuse, veterinary care, habitat, food and nutrition, employment, economics and human sociology, demographics and social life, and reproduction.

“Presently the near total lack of government influence over privately-owned elephants is an anachronism in an age when even in developing countries nearly everything is taxed, licensed, or controlled....,” wrote Lair (1986). No privately-owned elephants have ever benefited from any extensive management program, whether by a national government or an international agency. No privately-owned elephants are subject to any regulatory process beyond the most rudimentary registration procedures; no Asian nation has a licensing program which demands minimal standards of competence from mahouts and minimal standards of care from owners. No Asian country meaningfully regulates the buying and selling of elephants within its boundaries, even, ironically, those countries which have ratified CITES and strictly regulate external trade.

Very little research of any sort has been done regarding privately-owned elephants. Professionals and academics conducting research in Asia, particularly Westerners but also nationals of a country, will instinctively forge links with government elephant institutions so as to gain funding, easy access to elephants, and qualified local counterparts. While this natural partnership between researchers and government facilities is undoubtedly the most efficient way to conduct pure science, the alliance does nothing to explore the conditions of privately-owned elephants and their keepers. In every Asian country there is a desparate need for some intensive research aimed at privately-owned elephants.

The socio-economic perspective

Three distinct classes of people have hands-on impact on elephants: people who both own and ride elephants (henceforth termed ‘mahout-owners’), people who own but do not ride elephants (‘non-mahout owners’), and people who only ride elephants (‘hired mahouts’). These three classes hold up quite well in the field, with nearly all elephant ‘keepers’ falling quite neatly into only one class. The proportion of elephants owned by mahout-owners and non-mahout owners is often culturally based and varies widely between countries and even regions within countries. Non-mahout owners must employ hired mahouts, and thus these two classes are totally interdependent, often unhappily. Each class of keeper, often of different social status, naturally has its own perceptions of elephants and its own standards of care.

The three types of keepers can be described even more succinctly from an economic perspective than a social perspective. Hired mahouts are inevitably very poor, mahout-owners are almost always poor, and non-mahout owners are mostly at least well-to-do and often wealthy. (Nouveau riche owners, a modern problem, are wealthy by definition.) Distribution of wealth greatly colors the relationships between the classes.

Owner-mahouts

The easiest group of keepers to accurately characterize is the mahouts-owners: anywhere in Asia their elephants will be well treated, or at least treated as well as possible. Most mahout-owners are part-owners in what might best be termed ‘extended-family ownership’. (Each elephant requires at least two men who can control it, and three is better; it is exceedingly difficult for one man on his own to keep an elephant.) The elephant is carefully tended not only because it represents much of the family’s shared wealth, but also because family ownership is by its very nature self-policing; anybody caught being abusive or hot-tempered or lazy will be quickly brought back into line. Except for overwork, it is very rare to find an intentionally abused elephant in the hands of mahout-owners, and even with overwork the hardship visited on the animal is carefully measured against the needs of the family. The lack of abuse on the part of mahout-owners does not necessarily imply any great sentimentality; that might or might not exist, but as part of the family’s survival strategy there is always a concern for keeping the elephant in good health.

Two exceptions exist to the general rule that mahouts-owners are considerate, if not kind or humane, owners. First, some tribal mahout-owners, particularly wild elephant catchers, do treat elephants pretty roughly, seemingly as part of their culture’s ¾ or their profession’s ¾ view of elephants. Second, at times when profits are high, such as a boom in the timber trade, some mahout-owners will overwork some elephants, even to death, particularly when a boom coincides with a ready source of cheap unemployed elephants or cheap wild captives.

Hired mahouts

Hired mahouts are the next easiest class of keeper about which to generalize. Wherever hired mahouts are found there is likely to be significant abuse, particularly where there is poor supervision from owners. Sloth is endemic, and many hired mahouts are too lazy or too resentful to spend the large amount of time and energy needed to ensure that elephants are properly fed and watered. Evans (1910) states that “the class of men usually attending the elephants, if left to themselves, are from general indolence, carelessness, or from a desire to avoid fatigue and hardships of jungle-life ... quite liable to render their elephants unserviceable; ample supervision and systematic checks can alone prevent malpractices.” Most hired mahouts work under some sort of incentive system (piece rate or a wage with bonuses past a work quota) so they will tend to overwork the elephant, particularly since it does not belong to them. If a conscientious owner tries to limit the work, the mahout will often surrepitiously seek outside jobs, thus cutting dangerously into the elephant’s rest and feeding time. Kindness is, of course, to be found. Some cultures (the Karen) might be intrinsically kind, some hired mahouts are individually kind, and some hired mahouts are kind because they are very strictly supervised - but, generally speaking, hired mahouts are prone to mistreat elephants. Occasionally a hired mahout might even physically chastise an elephant to get revenge on a hated owner. The relationship between hired mahout and owner is often superficially polite but antagonistic under the surface.

In recent years a largely new class of hired mahouts has arisen, at least in Thailand and south India: young men with absolutely no prior experience with elephants. Not surprisingly, neophyte mahouts pose many problems, some of which are described in the country profiles.

· See “Mahoutship (II),” page 254

Non-mahout owners

Non-mahout owners presently fall into two primary sub-classes, traditional owners and nouveau riche owners. Traditional non-mahout owners are families which for endless generations kept, bought, sold, hired, and rented out elephants. Usually of high social class, traditional owners are well versed in elephants and usually quite kind to them, often for deeply ingrained cultural reasons. Unfortunately, while traditional owners seem to be a dying breed, nouveau riche owners seem to be proliferating in all the more developed countries, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka. Mostly local businessmen with new-found fortunes in real estate, logging, rice mills, and the like, nouveau riche owners buy elephants for what to them is pocket change. Sometimes purely status hungry, sometimes kind-hearted, nouveau riche owners nearly always spell trouble for elephants because inexperienced owners, no matter how well-intentioned, invariably lack the expertise needed to supervise their hired mahouts.

The cultural perspective

The following exploration of the cultural aspects of the people who kept - and keep - elephants is necessarily very broad because, whether past or present, so little is known about elephant keepers, particularly from the perspective of social history. The questions raised are far from purely theoretical, however, because cultural factors will largely determine the quality of the mahouts who will care for Asia’s 16,000 domesticated elephants in the future. Broadly speaking, keepers have fallen into three main cultural types of keeping: the ‘tribal traditions’, the ‘palace traditions’, and the ‘dominant-culture keepers’.

The tribal traditions

Since long before recorded history many if not most domesticated elephants have been kept by indigenous peoples which have from ancient times remained distinct from later dominant cultures or civilizations. A word is needed to describe these peoples. ‘Minority group’ implies a political nuance totally inappropriate whilst discussing elephant keeping; and ‘indigenous group’ is hopelessly vague. ‘Ethno-linguistic group’, probably best in terms of anthropology, is awkward and somehow fails to convey the deeper meaning. (‘Ethno-linguistic’ also fails to deliver an adjective; to talk of ‘tribal mahouts’ and ‘tribal training methods’ makes perfect sense, but ‘ethno-linguistic mahouts’ and ‘ethno-linguistic training methods’ are impossible.) The word ‘tribe’, although unfortunately holding derogatory connotations in some Asian countries, is used very confidently in India as a neutal, descriptive term, and that confidence would seem best in a book about elephant managment, not anthropology or politics. In 1996 any concept of ‘tribe’ can only be totally affirmative, with each tribe being a precious, surviving bit of human history and cultural diversity in a world hybridizing all too rapidly. Tribes are the cultural equivalent of endangered species.

Caste in mahouts is interesting in view of the tribal traditions. In Sri Lanka all mahouts are of low caste, as are the non-tribal mahouts (other than Muslims) in south India, and low caste seems to lend many of the psychological and sociological characteristics of being a tribal. Indeed, if one could dig back hundreds or even thousands of years, the origin of low caste mahouts might well lie in being an indigenous tribal people who inhabited the land long before dominant-culture invaders. Lal (1974), writing of India, states, “While at present it is often difficult to decide where the caste Hindu ends and where the tribal begins, the distinction may, however, be traced back to very early times....”

Pondering the origins and evolution of the keeping of wild elephants in domesticity, it is clear that the earliest practice must have been done by tribal peoples. Even at Mohenjo-Daro, it was surely tribal people who captured the elephants, not the dominant-culture artisans who made the famous clay seals which constitute the evidence. Tribal people everywhere pre-date dominant cultures, whether the ancient Aryans or the modern Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, Khmer, etc. In an analysis of elephants in the Mahabharata (an ancient epic portraying events which might have taken place between 1000 and 700 BC), Lahiri-Choudhury (1991b) wrote, “Experts in [elephant] warfare are [described as] aboriginal hunting-fishing tribes, most of whom come from the fringes of the area of Aryan settlement in northern India, and some are expressly identified as hunters belonging to non-Aryan tribes.”

Many of the surviving elephant-keeping tribes are also renown for their prowess as hunters, suggesting the possiblity that with the arrival of dominant cultures which developed a passion for elephants, some tribal men switched from being hunters of meat to being hunters and keepers of live elephants. Describing recent events in south India, Krishnamurthy and Wemmer (1995a) say that the gazetting of protected areas cut off many tribals from their right to hunt and gather, but, “In Tamil Nadu, elephant work was a readily accepted alternative to their traditions....” Perhaps such an occupational shift is just a modern reflection of an ancient pattern.

Tribal cultures were the only significant traditional elephant-keeping cultures to survive intact for long past World War II, but even tribal keepers suffered development-related damage to the environment and to culture. Deforestation in many countries - particularly Thailand, south India, and Sri Lanka - over a few decades eliminated both many food sources for elephants and many jobs for their owners. A decreased financial incentive to keep elephants caused a fall in numbers, while a parallel decline in the prestige conferred by elephant ownership steadily eroded cultural integrity. Development invariably brings many influences invidious to tribal culture: roads, television, literacy, education in the central language, a cash economy, and ultimately the pressure to assimilate into the dominant culture.

Cultural deterioration, as will be seen in many country profiles, has been catastrophic in those countries which have avoided international war and embraced development: Thailand, Sri Lanka, and much of India. Tribal traditions still exist in Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam but the number of keepers is so small as to pose a threat to viability. Only Myanmar and northeast India have intact, sizeable tribal traditions.

Tribal elephant-keeping cultures often appear robust while actually being deceptively fragile. Any tribal culture is comprised of two functionally interlinked components, the spiritual and the technical. Spiritual components includes all of the cosmology, magic, and ritual, while technique includes practical skills such as training, tying knots, health care, etc. In a traditional context the spiritual and technical elements are totally inseparable, but modern influences have robbed the spiritual of much of its power. Without a spiritual foundation tribal systems of keeping elephants survive poorly.

· See “Tribal mahoutship,” page 254, for problems brought by declining cultures.

Next to nothing, rather surprisingly, has been written about tribal elephant-keeping cultures. What little has been written in English concentrates on the human cultural aspects rather than the hands-on keeping of elephants. Many of the rare written glimpses into tribal keeping deal with the dramatic business of capturing elephants, and there is not a single useful book or study treating any single tribe’s day-to-day keeping and training methods, which are more mundane but far more complex than capture.

The palace traditions

The recently extinct elephant-keeping traditions of Moghul emperors and Indonesian sultans, of Burmese and Sri Lankan kings, has brought the tremendous loss of sophisticated management by aristocrats.

Elephant-keeping aristocracies in ancient Asia closely resembled the great chivalric kingdoms in medieval Europe, for example, and masterful mahoutship was easily as important as horsemanship was in the West. (Lahiri-Choudhuri [1995] implies that as far back as Neolithic times the elephant might have played in the tropics the role that the horse played in temperate climes.) Every young noble was expected to vigorously practice the art of elephant warfare and specifically to master mounted single combat. Much of the ceremony and metaphysical trappings of palace traditions was everywhere influenced culturally by ideas from India, but much cultural content was also of purely indigenous origin, contributed by local princes and their subordinates. The result was a rich and variegated mosaic of ‘palace traditions’ spread across the continent.

Because the palace’s ultimate use of elephants was in warfare, the keepers of war elephants - both battle elephants and transport elephants - were organized in a military chain of command, with the mahouts being privates and kings being generals. (The vague term ‘war elephant’, used by many writers, has created endless misunderstanding because most ‘war elephants’ were non-combatant transport animals, with only a few being actual ‘battle elephants’.) Palace elephant departments boasted large full-time staffs with little work to do except to perfect their craft under the close supervision of demanding and competitive aristocrats whose goal was to produce elephants superior to those of their peers. One Thai king was described (Wood, 1926) as “always either in the forest hunting elephants, or in his palace, attending to state affairs.” (This ruler, King Narai, was on his deathbed usurped by Phra Petracha - the general in command of his war elephants [Sitsayamkan, 1967]).

Indian miniatures and pictorial art portray an exquisite use of ropes and hardware. A miniature by Zain al-’Abidin, c. 1600, shows a bull elephant with two sets of restraint gear, one to discourage flight and another to stop it once begun; another miniature of c. 1590 shows the Emperor Akbar inspecting a newly caught elephant with beautifully tied ropes holding it to a tree. If such sophistication was reached with hardware, then it must be assumed that similarly lofty heights were reached in training, veterinary care, nutrition, and, most pertinent, supervision and administration.

Palace traditions began to decay many centuries ago when firearms and artillery first reached Asian battlefields. Still, the end of the use of elephants in actual combat had very little impact on domesticated populations numerically. Even after losing their value as an actual weapon, all potential battle elephants were still retained for ceremony or as transport and draft animals, jobs which probably employed easily twenty times the number of battle elephants. Palace traditions plummeted disastrously only with the coming of colonialization, whereupon royalty realized that they must fight with modern weapons and modern transport; elephants quickly became a useless and expensive heirloom. The princes’ loss of interest brought a decline of funds and manpower and, more telling, a loss of supervision from on high - in effect, a mass desertion of the officer corps which is felt to this day.

Mostly gone in the 19th century, only a few palace traditions survived past World War II, primarily through the pilkhanas (elephant stables) of a few Indian maharajahs and a few white elephants in Southeast Asia. In the Asian way, the particulars of training and keeping were not documented in detail, and certainly the aristocrats felt no compulsion to record specific techniques for posterity. (Of an attempt to research medieval European horse-keeping technique so as to recreate a crusader’s journey, Severin [1990] wrote, “Those who once travelled great distances rarely wrote down the practical details because they seemed so obvious. Day-to-day techniques were a part of their lives, and they certainly did not expect anybody else to have to study them.”) Most writings were poetic or metaphysical, and only a few works such as the Hasthividyarnava or the Arthashastra give any specific details of hands-on technique. Today, the vast bodies of practical knowledge of Asia’s many different palace traditions have vanished forever, the only remnant being the memories of a few old men. Certainly nowhere has enough knowledge of the old keeping techniques survived to even approach reconstructing a single palace tradition.

What was lost? The grandeur is missed, although that hardly matters management-wise. Undoubtedly many forgotten keeping and training techniques would be of great interest, but there are both surviving alternatives and modern techniques to compensate for lost technique. The truly irreplaceable loss brought by the passing of palace traditions was the loss of central management and sophisticated supervision. Besides superb supervision of their own elephant stables, palace traditions probably disseminated standards and rules embodied in distinct systems which were widely shared across a region.

Today, nowhere in Asia is there a facility which cares for elephants with anywhere near the scope, skill, and motives of vanished palace traditions. Short of the unlikely event of Asian governments expropriating all of their country’s privately-owned elephants to put them under state management, only Indonesia has the opportunity to establish enlightened large-scale management similar to a palace tradition. (Myanmar has thousands of elephants under central management but all are put to work so gruelling as to preclude anything resembling a palace tradition.)

In all of Asia only Indonesia, the newcomer to elephant keeping, has a chance to emulate the past - odd but fitting, since Indonesia had various palace traditions which vanished only in the late 19th century. Indonesia presently possesses three of the four essential ingredients for a palace tradition: large numbers of elephants, central control, and a management environment which allows for producing ideal elephants. Indonesia conspicuously lacks the fourth ingredient, sophisticated traditional knowledge taught and supervised by expert managers, but perhaps sophisticated modern knowledge could be introduced to stand in tradition’s stead.

Well-run forest department elephant-keeping systems are the conceptual heirs of palace traditions, if not partial physical descendants. The surviving government forestry establishments today (the Myanma Timber Enterprise, the Forest Industry Organisation in Thailand, and the various state forest departments in India) were modelled on the large teak firms of colonial days, but those firms had earlier gained most of their initial expertise, supervisorial personnel, and hierarchical organization - not to speak of elephants - from the stables of local principalities and minor nobility, which in the mid-19th century began divesting themselves of elephants. Sadly, forest department elephant establishments in Thailand and India are mostly in a state of terminal decline simply because the forests have been logged out.

The dominant-culture keepers

There must once have been a middle ground between the palace traditions and the tribal traditions, and it is fascinating to speculate on the nature of the linkage. The most perplexing question is clearly the degree of participation of mahouts and owners who were ‘dominant-culture keepers’, that is members of the civilization or race of the palace but not closely affiliated with the palace. To what extent did ethnic Burmese commoners - and Indians, Thais, Khmers, Vietnamese, etc. - work as mahouts? To probe the obscure history of dominant-culture keeping, a useful device is to briefly paint two plausible extremes. Readers should feel free to add whatever embellishments or objections they wish.

In the first scenario, tribal traditions were so prevalent that there was little need for dominant-culture mahouts. Everywhere except Sri Lanka there were plenty of elephant-keeping tribal peoples who were highly mobile and able to travel long distances for work. Some tribals worked in the stables of the aristocracy as hired hands. (To this day men of the Kui tribe are the keepers of the King of Thailand’s white elephants.) Writing particularly of south India, Krishnamurthy and Wemmer (1995a) say “The use of tribal people as elephant handlers clearly pre-dated the establishment of elephant camps by the British. Indian people evidently relied on tribals as a source of jungle expertise, and to capture and train elephants....” Men of the dominant culture preferred work in agriculture and the trades, shunning a profession left largely to what was perceived as inferior peoples. Many dominant-culture families were involved with elephants but mainly as powerful owners and brokers employing large numbers of tribal mahouts. In northeast India it was possible for dominant-culture managers to run huge operations employing tribal mahouts, as described by Milroy (1922) or Stracey (1963); Shand (1995) gives a more subjective glimpse of how such a dual-class system worked socially.

In the second scenario, the role of dominant-culture mahouts, though sadly undocumented, was highly significant, particularly in central lowland areas long cleared of tribal peoples. Only high numbers of dominant-culture mahouts can explain the high numbers of domesticated elephants cited in historical sources. Needing a reserve of elephants for war, from the loftiest empires down to the lowliest principalities, the nobles not only maintained their own elephant stables but also administered a sort of elephant-keeping yeomanry or militia which could be mobilized in times of war. (Probably the mahouts were accorded a social status one notch up from the ordinary peasant.) Elephant keeping has in many places been an open profession willing to employ any young man with the courage and tenacity to take on the job. Krishnamurthy and Wemmer (1995a) write that, “In old Mysore state non-tribal Muslims became occupational elephant men under the Maharaja of Mysore.” Not so long ago in the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia, in particular, there must have been many dominant-culture mahouts, many of whom quit riding and keeping elephants 40 or 50 years ago with the coming of railroads and development to the lowlands. But just as farmers and cavalrymen in Europe did not write about the daily lives of their horses and stable hands, the way of life of dominant-culture keepers has passed away unrecorded.

The balance of tribal and dominant-culture mahouts must lie somewhere between these two extremes, and there is not enough hard evidence to prove or disprove either hypothesis. The balance between tribal and dominant-culture mahouts has also surely varied regionally, with many regions dominated by either tribal or dominant-culture keepers and other regions holding a mix.

Many unexplored questions are posed by today’s remaining dominant-culture keepers, particularly their origins, in the more developed countries. Are they remnants of a palace tradition? Are some long assimilated tribals? What are their motives for keeping elephants? Are many dominant-culture mahouts are simply opportunistic newcomers? How skilful are they compared to tribal mahouts?

Conclusions: The cultural perspective

The many palace elephant-keeping traditions have vanished forever, and the palace traditions’ last spiritual heirs, the great forest departments, are in terminal decline except in Myanmar. Many tribal elephant-keeping traditions have died away and the surviving traditions are severely threatened everywhere except probably Myanmar and northeast India. Except possibly Myanmar, dominant-culture keepers, at least those of long family lineage, are clearly on the wane.⁴ Who, then, is taking care of Asia’s domesticated elephants?

The relative proportions of tribal keepers and dominant-culture keepers is a very important cultural factor effecting treatment extended to elephants, with the tribals on balance providing more expert care. As tribal cultures disintegrate under development, most of Asia’s training and keeping systems are well into fragmentation. In some countries, notably Thailand, elephant-keeping systems are rapidly becoming degraded and mongrelized.⁵

When culture fails to motivate, the only possible reason for keeping elephants is to make money, and where the only motivation is money, the quality of care usually falls abysmally. When there is little or no money to be made, elephants will be deserted as a useless burden, probably fondly remembered by tribals and perhaps not so fondly by dominant-culture mahouts.

· See “Mahoutship (II),” page 254.

Employment (I)

Overwork is present everywhere. Evans (1910) wrote, “Twenty years’ experience in this Province [Burma], during which time I have had abundant opportunities for observing elephants and their treatment by masters and mahouts, has compelled me to believe that in many instances (and I say so with reluctance) a maximum of labour is exacted with a minimum regard bestowed upon their wants and creature comforts - in other words, they are ‘sweated’.” A life spent skidding logs often consists of endless drudgery punctuated by moments of extreme danger. Speaking of the “elephants employed in forest operations in Burma,” Evans wrote, “The percentage of deaths that annually occur amongst elephants employed in this branch of the industry is probably from 10 to 20 per cent.”

The elephant’s loss of utility results from the loss of two major paying jobs, logging and transport. Logging is the best known and most obvious type of lost work - actually now in the last throes of a lingering death everywhere except Myanmar. Elephant logging has become famous largely because it was so vividly described and romanticised by a few Teak Wallah authors, but from a historical perspective the vast teak industry of colonial days was a minor, short-lived, and virtually overnight aberration. Historically, skidding a log was no different than dragging a boulder, a cut stone, a cannon, a road grader, or even a plow.

In terms of sheer numbers of elephants employed, the more obscure type of lost work, transporting goods and people over rough terrain, everywhere employed far more elephants than ever did logging, perhaps by a factor of twenty or thirty. The elephant sounds a most unlikely pack animal for mountains and swamps, but, while a bit slow, elephants are astonishingly sure-footed, as delightfully pictured by Brock (1884) describing a tortuous trip in northern Thailand: “I had ample opportunity of noting the sureness of foot of the elephants, which seemed quite to enjoy the excitement of climbing and descending the steep acclivities, mounting rugged slopes where a goat would seem hardly to find a foothold, and sliding down-hill on their bellies, with their forelegs spread straight out in front, and their hind legs behind, with a self-command that a mule, using all his legs, might have envied.” The peculiar anatomy of the elephant’s foot makes it probably the only draft animal which is equally adept on both steep hillsides and soft, muddy ground.

At the turn of the century in Thailand there were said to be 20,000 transport elephants used around Chiang Mai alone, and that was just part of a haulage web which spanned the whole region. Most of South and Southeast Asia enjoyed similarly vast networks, most of which must have interconnected to some degree. Today, though in much smaller numbers, transport elephants remain irreplaceable in roadless country, especially during the rainy season, in Myanmar, northeast India, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

As will be seen, in the more developed countries a lack of employment is everywhere a grave threat facing owners and thus ultimately elephants. Lair (1986) wrote, “Owners primarily concerned with profit will tend to divest themselves of elephants once they no longer make money.” The bottom line for the mahout-owner is the survival of his family, and when that cannot be guaranteed elephants will be sold, if possible, or even released.

· See “Employment (II),” page 252.

Numbers of domesticated elephants in Asia

Of the thirteen countries in Asia which have wild elephants, eleven also have domesticated elephants: Myanmar, Thailand, India, Lao PDR, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Malaysia. Indonesia and Malaysia both lost highly valued domesticated elephant populations in the last century. Indonesia is presently reintroducing the tradition by establishing a new elephant culture which began with the hiring of Thai mahouts as teachers and the use of Thai khoonkies to help capture wild elephants.

The available numbers for national populations in Asia range widely in accuracy from reasonably complete registration efforts (Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia), to intermediate efforts which might be called surveys (Lao PDR, Vietnam), to a wide variety of informed opinion (India and Sri Lanka), and then descend all the way to one guess for Cambodia (McNeely, 1975) which has echoed through the literature for twenty years. Olivier (1978a) referred to one early estimate of wild elephants in Thailand as a “tentative informed guess,” a fair description of many of the numbers available about domesticated elephants.

Table 2: Likely numbers of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) in domesticity¹

¹Figures are from the “Likely” column of Table 3. All sources and criteria are given in country profiles.

The rationale for reaching the highs and lows in Table 3 (and their average, presented as a convenience in Table 2) is given in country profiles in “Number of domesticated elephants” along with proper citation of sources. Low numbers comprise the irreducible minimum number of elephants produced by surveys, where available, plus the very lowest possible number of elephants likely to have gone uncounted; low numbers in the absence of surveys proceed from the literature and interviews. High numbers proceed from an attempt to balance all of the credible evidence for larger numbers: high-side expert opinions in print, interviews, historical precedents, etc.

Possible high numbers of elephants are difficult to estimate because even in those countries with registration procedures, significant numbers of elephants still lie beyond the reach of the authorities. In Myanmar, for example, many elephants go uncounted in remote areas and in vast swathes of territory largely beyond government reach. In Thailand registration methods are lax enough that a significant number of elephants go unregistered.

Reaching a single figure estimate for the domesticated elephants in each Asian country is, considering the dubious data and conflicting expert opinions, a taxing process. A single ‘most likely’ number is nonetheless important if only to promote clear communication and to avoid constant repetition of, for example, “the 3,800 to 4,000 domesticated elephants in Thailand.” Even a simple comparison of two countries’ elephant populations becomes nightmarish if the likely highs and lows must be constantly presented. The ‘most likely’ numbers presented in Tables 2 and 3 are not an arithmetical average of the low and high numbers, but rather a middle figure swayed by intuition.

Table 3 lists key parameters of domesticated elephants by country in order of the likely number of domesticated elephants. Given where available are the numbers of government-owned and privately-owned elephants, the number of surveyed and registered elephants, probable high and low numbers, and the most likely number between them. A plausible number for wild elephants is followed by the ratio of domesticated elephants to wild elephants.

Affinities between countries with domesticated elephants

National domesticated elephant populations sometimes share characteristics with other countries. Below are discussed five mostly unrelated affinities: the size of national populations, the domesticated-to-wild elephant ratio, a cultural and religious divide, the effect of development, and importance in conservation. These diverse subjects well illustrate the complex nature and divergences of national populations.

Size of national populations

In terms of numbers, there is very obviously a ‘big three’: Myanmar, Thailand, and India collectively hold about 13,200 elephants or 80% of the total in Asia. Each of these countries has domesticated elephants which outnumber any of the second-tier countries by a factor of at least three. Myanmar’s 6,400 elephants are by far the largest population, 38% of all domesticated elephants in Asia or about as many as Thailand and India put together. Myanmar has even greater importance than its overwhelming numbers suggest because it the only large population which enjoys largely intact habitat and intact traditional keeping conditions.

In the second tier, Lao PDR holds at least double the populations of Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia, although if captures of wild elephants on Sumatra progress as planned, Indonesia will surge past Lao PDR around the year 2001. Bangladesh, Nepal, and Malaysia all have very small numbers.

Numbers of elephants are in any case only suggestive, not diagnostic, of the health of a domesticated population. A population of 100 elephants with a normal number of animals of breeding age (mirroring the population structure of a healthy wild population) has infinitely more reproductive value than 500 elephants of a very high median age, such as the nearly moribund population in Europe (Kurt, 1994). Unfortunately, in Asia there is no hard data and only a few casual expert opinions, but it is safe to assume that the median age is significantly higher than normal in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and south and north India, none of which has self-sustaining birth rates. These countries historically made up the shortfall by recruiting young captives from the wild, but that infusion of youth has everywhere been lost with bans on capture; if the low birth rates remain static, the median age must rise higher as numbers fall lower with every passing year from the last captives.

The domesticated-to-wild elephant ratio

Olivier (1978a) frequently uses past high numbers of domesticated elephants to argue for past high numbers of wild elephants; he does so for the recent past in Thailand and Burma anddummytable 3also for the distant past, particularly for parts of India. He writes, “I am sure that the enormous stocks of tame elephants once held there [India], reflect wild elephant populations whose size would appear far out of proportion with any remaining today.”

Table 3: Various parameters of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) in domesticity

¹ A “c.” means ‘circa’, i.e., not tied to any particular year.

² ‘Government’ means government-owned elephants, including state enterprises; ‘Private’ means privately-owned elephants.

³ ‘Survey’ means elephants are either registered or, less accurately, surveyed. ‘Low’ and ‘High’ are working minimum and maximums as discussed in country profiles. ‘Likely’ is ‘the most likely number’, for use when a single figure is required.

⁴ The arithmetical mean of the high and low estimates in Table 1 (Dr. Charles Santiapillai. pers. comm., 1996). The single number implies no precision but is needed to compare wild and domesticated elephants in the following column.

⁵ Domesticated elephants, from ‘Likely’, are expressed as a percentage of wild elephants in the preceding column.

⁶ All sources are fully cited in “Number of domesticated elephants” for that country.

Since few present day national domesticated elephant populations in Asia have ever had a self-sustaining birth rate, high past numbers of domesticated elephants speak not only of past high numbers of wild elephants, but also of massive captures of those wild elephants. In many regions, very high capture rates must surely have had grievous impact on wild elephants, particularly because capture tends to concentrate in accessible areas with favorable terrain.

Countries with very high domesticated-to-wild elephant ratios are of two primary types. In the newest and simplest type (such as in Lao PDR, Vietnam, and all too likely Cambodia), the domesticated-to-wild ratio is very high simply because poaching, war, and rapid habitat destruction have killed - not captured - so many wild elephants as to dramatically and quickly elevate the domesticated subpopulation’s share of the total population. The second and more interesting case involves countries where high domesticated-to-wild ratios have been much longer evolving and where most of man’s decimation of wild elephants has been captures rather than kills. Myanmar’s domesticated elephant population is equal to about 95% of the country’s probable wild population, which, considering the low birth rate and known high recent captures, argues overwhelmingly for massive past exploitation of many generations of wild elephants. Thailand’s large domesticated elephant population constitutes a phenomenal 280% of the probable number of wild elephants.

· See Table 3, page 27, for country data on the domesticated-to-wild elephant ratio.

· See “Domesticated-to-wild ratio,” page 166, for Thailand’s situation.

Very little biodata exists to clarify the extent and exact role which capture has played in creating the demographics of current populations, although a stab might be taken for Myanmar, where an on-going analysis of elephant log books might reveal much evidence. Many inevitable questions are unanswerable. How many of today’s domesticated elephants were wild-caught? How many years ago were they captured? How old were they at capture? Could the average age of domesticated elephants in Thailand be very high because of many survivors of massive captures four or five decades ago?

Such questions are unanswerable with any certainty. The one certainty is that in all countries with a high domesticated-to-wild elephant ratio, irregardless of the cause, the domesticated elephant subpopulation will become increasingly important in national conservation, particularly because of their high survival rate should there ever be a need to release them into the wild.

The cultural divide

The elephant-keeping countries of Asia comprise two geographically distinct groups separated also by religion and culture, what might loosely be called a Hindu bloc and a Buddhist bloc. (These blocs correspond closely with the geographic and geopolitical terms, ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’.) The Hindu or Brahminic bloc is Sri Lanka and India (including Nepal but excluding tribal areas of the northeast); while the Buddhist bloc is comprised of Myanmar, Thailand, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam. (Muslim Indonesia’s reintroduced tradition is so new as to be totally extraneous to the cultural divide on the mainland; Bangladesh and Malaysia are Muslim but their populations are too small and too anomalous to be relevant.)

Caste pervades elephant keeping in the Hindu bloc, with even tribal mahouts in south and north India mostly working for and under the style of high-caste Hindus. Sri Lanka is, of course, a predominantly Buddhist country and virtually all mahouts and owners are Buddhist; the elephant keeping, however, remains steadfastly Hindu in its essentials, based on Brahminic cosmology and a strict caste system. Despite the great religious significance of elephants in Sinhalese Buddhism, hands-on elephant keeping shares far more culturally with neighboring south India than with fellow Buddhist countries far to the east.

Both blocs also have tribal keepers who are mostly animists although some animists have an overlay of Buddhism, Hinduism, or even Christianity. Tribal mahouts are quite common in most Buddhist countries, as will be seen. Sri Lanka has no tribal keepers, although its low-caste mahouts might have been so thousands of years and today fill the same niche. There are tribal mahouts in south and north India; elephant keeping in northeast India, which is mostly tribal, generally shares far more culturally with neighboring countries than with India.

The Hindu-Buddhist elephant-keeping schism is highly subjective in many aspects but nonetheless very tangible when relating with mahouts in the field. Hindu and Buddhist mahouts and owners have different culturally inculcated beliefs, including different styles and philosophies of elephant keeping. There seems to be a more direct, emotional connection between man and elephant in the Buddhist east and a more distant but no less masterful man-elephant relationship in the Hindu bloc.

Beyond such abstractions, the Hindu bloc suffers three culturally-induced problems which will in three observable ways confront any modern management scheme in the field. First, the Hindu bloc has rigid caste systems which, at least in modern times, lower the mahouts’ self esteem and thus create a peculiar personnel problem. Second, the Hindu bloc has a very high proportion of hired mahouts compared to mahouts who own the elephants they ride, a situation which often brings poor care to elephants. Third, and most quantifiable, the elephants kept in the Hindu bloc have much lower birth rates than those kept in the Buddhist nations to the east. The Hindu bloc’s almost total lack of births arises from ancient metaphysical inhibitions and prohibitions. (Low birth rates and the probable cultural causes are discussed in the country profiles for India and Sri Lanka.) Most Buddhist and tribal elephant keepers at least allow breeding and many encourage breeding, so that birth rates in the Buddhist east, while not self-sustaining, are on the whole reasonably good.

Development and its effects

World War II was a watershed period for many of Asia’s domesticated elephant populations, not so much because of the destruction the war brought (that was limited largely to Burma) but because the end of the fighting bought new technology, most especially the introduction of machines for dragging and hauling in forestry. Some countries developed so rapidly - at a rate made possible only by Western methods, particularly building roads with heavy machinery - that the environment surrounding the elephants, both wild and domesticated, was decimated within two or three decades: forests lost, lowland habitat lost, and a precipitous fall in paying work. Except for Myanmar, domesticated elephants have experienced a steady and inexorable decline since the critical juncture of World War II.

When assessing potential international management efforts aimed at common problems, development and its effects dictates the most useful groupings of countries.

Myanmar is a bloc unto itself, the world’s largest national population of domesticated elephants in the habitat least damaged by development.

Indonesia is in a position uniquely its own. While in other countries development has gravely damaged elephant keeping, in Indonesia development actually created the need for elephant keeping by driving wild elephants from the forests and forcing government to capture many of them. (Once in captivity, elephants in Indonesia do suffer problems brought by development, particularly a lack of food.)

Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka, all relatively developed countries, have enjoyed relatively stable governments and avoided the horrors of international war, all the while working to develop their economy. Peaceful development has, however, brought extreme environmental degradation in all three countries, greatly reducing food sources for elephants and work opportunities for their owners. All three domesticated elephant populations are apparently growing moribund; capture has been banned to protect wild elephants, and birth rates are too low to sustain numbers, particularly in India and Sri Lanka. All three countries are also suffering a severe, development-induced decline in the quality of mahoutship. On the positive side, however, peaceful development has brought Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka a free press, a well-informed and vocal middle class, and, more recently, NGOs powerful or influential enough to goad and guide lethargic government agencies into action.

Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam - or ‘Indo-China’ - have many contiguous borders and, not surprisingly, face similar problems. All three countries have small and poorly known domesticated elephant populations recently ravaged by the horrors of war - and all three are now being hurt by post-war development. (The decades-long Indo-China conflict brought great physical destruction, but it might have preserved forests and thereby saved tribal cultures; war is far less destructive of culture than is development.) The Indo-China countries seem to now be receiving the worst of development while still lacking orderly development’s partially compensating benefits; far more quickly than did their neighbors, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam will get dams, skidders, chainsaws, and roads, but without the benefit of plentiful trained scientists, without an active media, and without progressive and dedicated NGOs.

Importance in conservation

From an animal husbandry perspective, Myanmar is the jewel in the crown. A pragmatist concerned solely with preserving large, sustainable numbers of domesticated elephants and not caring about national heritage or the fate of local genotypes might well decide to pour all available resources into Myanmar and let the other countries decline without support. Indonesia is of conservation importance far beyond its sizeable and steadily growing numbers because its elephants are almost entirely government-owned and thus extremely manageable as a group.

From the perspective of international science and conservation, all countries are equally important because of the local genotypes they hold. From a national conservation perspective, all counties are indubitably of equal importance. Who is to say that Bangladesh’s 77 elephants are less important to its 100 million people than Thailand’s nearly 4,000 elephants are to its 60 million citizens?

· See Table 25, page 258, for human-to-elephant ratios in Asian countries.