Introduction (2024)

Introduction

The management of the Asian elephant is quite anomalous in theconservation world, with circ*mstances quite bizarre compared to other largemammals. Elephas maximus Linn., 1758, an endangered species listed inAppendix I of CITES, is thought to number between 37,000 and 48,000 animals inthe wild. Scattered through thirteen countries, the wild elephant is nearlyeverywhere severely threatened by habitat destruction, poaching, andfragmentation into small, isolated groups. Many population biologists believethat nowhere in Asia is there a single wild population large enough to avoidinbreeding over the long term. Of the two large captive groups outside of Asia,the population in European zoos and circuses is essentially moribund with mostcows too old to breed, while the North American population is far fromself-sustaining at a time when both law and public opinion make it ever harderto keep elephants.

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

Many difficult questions are posed by Asia’s domesticatedelephants. Are they are an invaluable resource in wildlife conservation? Or arethey an outdated cultural relic which should be allowed to fade away? What dothey 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 succorto these troubled animals?

Development and habitat destruction have brought a plethora ofproblems to privately-owned elephants in Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka: poorlegal protection, incomplete registration, bureaucratic indifference, poorveterinary care, skewed prices reflecting rarity value, shifting ownershippatterns, 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 andnecessary to discuss the domesticated Asian elephant’s decline in terms of(a) its loss of significance in national economies, (b) the difficulties ofunfreezing elephant sperm, (c) the relative sexual ineptitude of bull elephantsdeprived of opportunities for adolescent sex play, and (d) alcoholism andfeelings of inferiority amongst low caste mahouts. Wider issues affectingmanagement include habitat destruction and the waning influence of Buddhist andHindu precepts in daily life.

The scientific and technical disciplines of biology, forestry,veterinary medicine, animal husbandry, and law are obviously essential inmanaging domesticated elephants. Less obviously, the crucial caretaking functionperformed by mahouts and owners requires the entry of humanities such as socialanthropology and sociology, as well as more arcane subjects such as comparativereligion, social history, linguistics, etc. The study and management ofdomesticated elephants is consequently as much art as science. In terms ofprecision or being a ‘hard science’, the management and conservationof domesticated elephants is to wildlife biology, for example, what wildlifebiology is to chemistry or physics. Macro-management of domesticated elephantsis a hybrid, catch-all science much like sociology, and thinking on the‘sociology’ of elephants in man-created environments is as primitiveas was human sociology in its infancy, with the need to define fundamentals justbeginning to be perceived.

Keeping elephants also has an ethical dimension. Sadly, aparticular sub-set of sociology, penology, might be a more accurate comparisonfor elephant keeping. Elephant management raises ethical issues such as -expressed in their human equivalent - kidnapping, forced labor, starvationrations, solitary confinement, torture, and even capital punishment. DrawingWestern-derived ethical conclusions makes little sense, however, whilewitnessing the demise of over four millennia of elephant keeping inAsia.

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 ActionPlan for its Conservation (Santiapillai and Jackson, 1990).

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

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

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

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

The man-elephant relationship is quite strange. While most ofthe domestic animals now most highly attuned to man (the dog, the cat, the waterbuffalo, etc.) have wild forebears which are largely untameable, manywild-caught elephants quickly and easily form intimate bonds with their keeperseven though their wild temperament has never been modified through selectivebreeding. Some elephants form such warm and affectionate bonds with man as todeceive the observer into thinking that this animal must have been made trulydomestic. Many other elephants in domesticity, however, remain unremittinglywild, hostile to man and ready to kill him at every chance. Clearly, adomesticated elephant is simply a wild animal in chains - but a wild animalfrequently gentle and intelligent enough to be totally trustworthy as ababy-sitter to watch over human infants. What adjective best describes suchanimals when kept by man, particularly in relation to their wildcongeners?

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

The dilemma of choosing an adjective might seem a trivialsemantic quibble but the unavoidable decision necessitates making fundamentaldistinctions about the provenance of Asian elephants in domesticity and alsoabout their genetic manipulation - or surprising lack thereof - at the hands ofman.

· See “Thehistory of domestication,” page 12.

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

Clutton-Brock (1981) is eclectic but illuminating. Warningthat the animals utilized by man cannot always be neatly categorized, shedivides 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 thewild progenitor.” Clutton-Brock’s second group, the exploited captives(a curiously evocative turn of phrase), consists of wild animals which aftercapture are tamed or trained to some degree. Certainly both the “livelihoodand breeding” of Asian elephants in captivity are potentially underabsolute human control, but through thousands of years of keeping elephants,man’s inherent control over breeding has rarely been exercised, and neverexercised selectively through a significant number of generations.¹Many if not most domesticated elephants over all time have been either capturedin the wild or sired by a wild bull and thus the elephant is an ‘exploitedcaptive’. Clutton-Brock’s innovative terms do vividly illustrate acrucial distinction, but they are also unwieldy and unconventional.

Facing the same linguistic dilemma, Van Gelder (1969) termsClutton-Brock’s ‘man-made animals’ as ‘domesticanimals’ - a word often applied to elephants - and defines domesticanimals, oversimplifying somewhat, as populations that are biologically orbehaviorally different from their wild ancestors. The elephant as kept by manviolates both stipulations. Biologically, elephants have never been subject tocenturies, much less millennia, of selective breeding and genetic manipulationas 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 denotesClutton-Brock’s ‘exploited captives’ to be‘domesticated’ and stresses that being ‘domesticated’ is aprocess 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 thougha 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 termincreasingly used in the West and with much justification. ‘Captive’describes the elephants’ situation from both a physical and legalperspective, and ‘captive’ cries out their plight from an emotionalperspective. (‘Domesticated’, by contrast, makes an often brutalrelationship sound almost cosy.) But, tempting as it is, the term‘captive’ chafes in two ways. First, ‘captive’ implies thatall elephants held by man were caught in the wild when for thousands of yearsmany elephants in Asia have been born in domesticity, and presently the ratio ofdomestic-born to wild-caught elephants is increasing in most countries; thus, tocall the elephants kept by man in Asia ‘captive elephants’ ismisleading and inaccurate. Second, while ‘captive elephant’ might beperfectly apt referring to an animal in a zoo in San Francisco or a circus inMoscow, the term seems contrived and opinionated, even judgmental, when appliedto Asian traditions stretching back at least 4,000 years and possibly to thePalaeolithic.

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

The period covered

This book is conceptually the middle section of a largerunwritten work, a three-volume series comprehensively overviewing the managementof the domesticated Asian elephant: (I) The Past: History, culture, and keepingtechnique; (II) The Present: Status and problems by country; and (III) TheFuture: Management and solutions. In this scheme, the current book is the secondvolume, the present, written out of sequence so as to respond to the graveproblems threatening domesticated Asian elephants.

By ‘the present’ is meant roughly the coming to Asiaof colonialism, international mercantilism, and modern technology - the roots oftoday’s ‘globalization’. References to earlier, pre-1850 timesare sparse except for information which strongly illuminates issues stillimportant today. (In any case, social history, into which this book occasionallywanders, is far more important than the conventional history of names anddates.) Coverage becomes reasonably complete around World War II. This bookdiscusses the future only briefly and even then only to point out loomingproblems unavoidable over the short term, about twenty years or the time a calfborn today will take to reach maturity.

Legal status and jurisdiction ofelephants

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

Consider the current legal status of animals such as thevarious pigs in the genus Sus, the cattle in the genus Bos, or thebuffalo in the genus Bubalus. All three of these genera have both clearlydefined 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 thejurisdiction of wildlife departments, while the Taihu pig, the Zebu cow, and the57 endangered breeds of domestic buffalo become the ward of livestock or animalhusbandry departments. But while wild specimens of Elephas maximus fallclearly to the wildlife camp and thus get complete legal protection, thedomesticated elephant gets no protector because of its nebulous and confusingstatus as a wild species never domesticated - that is, never made a truedomestic animal - even though kept in domesticity for millennia.

Individual wildlife biologists are invariably sympathetic, butnational wildlife agencies universally (except perhaps Myanmar) consider thedomesticated Asian elephant to be just another domestic animal and thus none oftheir business - even in countries where the domesticated elephant is legallyclassified as wild and the wildlife agency has been given jurisdiction.Livestock departments generally consider the domesticated elephant to be a wildanimal, an exotic remnant of the past with no commercial value and thus unworthyof their attention. (The more developed a country is, the more staunchly is theelephant excluded; only in Myanmar and Lao PDR are livestock departmentsgenuinely interested in domesticated elephants.) Forestry institutions andforesters happily acknowledge a great historical debt but then quite correctlyconclude that protecting or managing domesticated elephant populations is nottheir job. In the end, caring for privately-owned domesticated Asian elephantsin most countries turns out to be nobody’s job, usually for reasons of howlaw assigns jurisdiction.

Interrelationship of wild anddomesticated elephants

The line between wild and domesticated elephants initiallyseems very distinct. This commonly perceived schism is bolstered becauseElephas maximus in the hands of man superficially resembles the situationof the true domestic animals. But the true domestic animals have throughman’s artifices widely diverged genetically from their wild ancestor, whilethe domesticated elephant has never been selectively bred and thus bothgenetically and behaviorally remains a wild elephant. Too many conservationistsintellectually well aware of this distinction persist in drawing a fundamentalbut false division between wild and domesticated Asian elephants. Lair (1982)said, “We can no longer afford to look at wild and domestic elephants astwo distinct populations; the relationship of wild and domestic elephants mustincreasingly be seen as a synergistic or interdependent relationship.” Theinterface between what are really two subpopulations is surprisinglyporous.

Releasability

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

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

Wild-to-domesticatedtransfer

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

Recruitment from the wild subpopulation is not limited tocaptive animals but also includes transferred germ plasma from wild bullscovering domesticated cows. In India and Sri Lanka calves sired by wild bullshave constituted virtually the only captive births. Sometimes in the past the‘recruitment’ of wild gametes reached immense proportions. OfBurma’s pre-colonial past, O’Connor (1907) wrote, “The King owneda thousand elephants of whom the males were thoroughly broken to service; thefemales 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 toomuch of a gentleman to point out that most visiting “wild neighbours”were breeding bulls. Similar semi-managed breeding systems were found inThailand and, indeed, across the continent.

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

Domesticated-to-wildtransfer

Casual thought and cursory examination of the historicalrecord suggest that, apart from a few escapees, domesticated elephants do notbecome wild elephants. Further reading and thought, however, show that theinterchange between the two subpopulations is far more bi-directional than firstappears. The most obvious domesticated-to-wild transfer is the fairly frequentoccurrence 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 haveintentionally released individual elephants into the wild for many reasons:retirement, a temporary illness mistaken for a wasting disease, awork-preventing injury in an otherwise healthy elephant, being fundamentallyuncontrollable, etc. (In Thailand a few years ago, a wild elephant named NgaNgorn, famous for killing two visitors to Khao Yai National Park, was almostsurely a released domesticated elephant, probably set free for beinguncontrollable.)

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

Mass or group releases have also long been common. In what isnow Thailand, for example, in order to save manpower and money the kingdom ofAyutthaya in times of peace released many of its war elephants, probablyparticularly transport animals, into forests holding wild elephants; thereleased animals were recaptured (along with, it must be presumed, theiroffspring) only when war broke out. Giles (1930a) wrote, “In central Siam,especially in the circles of Prachin and Ayudhya, where not many years back onewould frequently meet herds of semi-wild elephants browsing on the trees andbushes 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 RoyalElephant Department [krom kochabal] and were driven to the great elephantkraal at Ayudhya on the occasion of a royal drive or hunt.”Royal elephantparks (gajavana) in India were seemingly run along similar lines of‘periodic release’ and, indeed, they might even have been the modelfor the Thai system.

Another frequent motive for mass releases was in times of warto deny the use of one’s elephants to an enemy, much like spiking cannon orreleasing cavalry horses. Olivier (1978a) writes that “ancient kingdomswould attempt to capture the tame stocks of enemies, or accept them astributes....” But many defeated enemies would have freed their elephants inpreference to watching the victor enjoy their use; as late as World War II manyelephants in Burma were set free as the only alternative to confiscation by theBritish or, most often, the Japanese. In an unusual - although unusual perhapsonly because of place - mass release in the 1930s, the Andaman islands of Indiasuddenly gained a wild population (or, perhaps more accurately, a feralpopulation 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 tohistory and releases undoubtedly were far more common in the past, butintentional releases continue to this day. Over the past few years one provinceof northern Thailand is said to have had 20 or 30 domesticated elephantsreleased haphazardly into the wild by owners who could no longer make a livingfrom them, could no longer afford to keep them, and could not find buyers forthem.

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

Although much less common than wild elephants mating withdomesticated elephants, domesticated elephants do sometimes geneticallyinfiltrate the wild population through breeding. One observer {Mukherjee,1995} says that in West Bengal and other parts of northeast India, mahoutswill sometimes release hobbled domesticated bulls to mate with wild cows, themahouts’ motive being to allow their charge to relieve tension. Dr. Khyne UMar (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 etal., 1990). Despite destroying property and causing “even a fewhuman deaths,” Ganesha was seen as a “deity” by local villagers.Ganesha proved to be a superb breeder. Regularly visiting the Koshi Tappuelephant camp, he had sired seven calves as of 1988. Assume for the sake ofargument that Ganesha, as is the norm in Nepal, was purchased in northeastIndia, where nearly all domesticated elephants have been captured in the wild.If so, Ganesha would have been born a wild elephant, then domesticated, thenreleased back to the wild - from where he sired calves born in domesticity.(Given his success with domesticated cows, he is likely to have covered wildcows as well.)

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

The crossing of domesticated elephants back into the wild isnot radical theory but rather the less common direction of a two-way interchangewhich 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 becomesawkward; the terms ‘wild population’ and ‘domesticatedpopulation’ are normally used henceforth.)

Accepting Sukumar’s (1992) assumption of between two andfour million wild elephants captured since the dawn of elephant keeping, theremust surely have been significant trickle-back into the wild. Man hasunintentionally and unknowingly been genetically manipulating some regional wildpopulations for thousands of years. The fact that releases followed by breedinghave 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 havespread.

Distance of transfer

Elephants are extremely mobile creatures, and wild-caughtelephants 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 yearsbeen sent great distances all over Asia, including to many areas rich with wildelephants. (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 afew suffice. Alexander on his return to Europe took along many domesticatedelephants from the Indian subcontinent, passing through now defunct wildelephant populations in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Kublai Khan, the founder ofthe Mongol dynasty in China, was said to have 5,000 elephants, and many of themtravelled far. Ceylon’s fine elephants have been a valuable commodityexported for over 2,000 years; Kurt (1969) speaks of exports as early as the 6thcentury BC, and Digby (1971) of exports in the 3rd century BC. Jayewardene(1994c) says, “Records show that even though Sri Lanka was exporting alarge number of elephants in the 5th and 6th century BC, a number of elephantswere also imported into the country after the 4th century BC.”

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

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

Sending old or inferior elephants over great distances atgreat expense makes little sense, so nearly all elephants sold or gifted faraway would have been young, fit, and handsome. Only exceptional animals weresent expensively by ship, and probably even elephants sent overland were farabove average. Most were probably young adult males, valued highly everywherefor their strength and their beauty, and nearly all gifts would have beentuskers 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 bereleased in the hope of passing their tusk-bearing qualities to the largelytuskless wild bulls.) Given their youth and superior physical qualities, anunnaturally large number of bulls sent far from home must have been goodbreeders. Bulls are able to cover more cows than cows are able to drop calves,another reason that any released or escaped translocated elephants would havebred with disproportionate effect. As time passed, some of the translocatedelephants would increasingly have included not just a single local genotype butrather a mix, for example a tusker sired by a Cambodian bull out of a dam fromnorthern Thailand being sent as a royal gift to Sri Lanka.

The movement of wild elephants at the hand of man to breed farfrom home is quite unusual in the breeding history of a wild species. Whiledomestic dogs and water buffalo, for example, have often been moved at the handsof man and some have perhaps then bred with their wild progenitors at the newlocation, the moved dogs and buffalo were normally long-domesticated lineages.Translocated elephants, however, were and are wild animals. Wild elephants weremoved by man thousands of kilometers, sometimes to mate with local wildelephants and perhaps even with a different subspecies. (A similar situation hasocurred with reindeer and a few other species but never over such greatdistances.) For millennia man has been unwittingly and unintentionallyinfluencing the genetics of wild elephants over considerabledistances.

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

The role of domesticated elephants inwild elephant conservation

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

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

1. Domesticated elephant populations areeverywhere in Asia the final refuge for wild elephants in situations where theycan no longer be tolerated or no longer survive in nature.

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

a. to bolster declining wild groups orthose with a sexual imbalance.

b. to reintroduce elephants in areas where they have beenextirpated.

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 incapturing and training them for wildlife management purposes: saving doomedelephants, placating local opinion, clearing for unavoidable development,etc.

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

5. Domesticated elephant populations which produce significantnumbers of calves eliminate or greatly reduce pressure to reinstate legalcapture of wild elephants for commercial purposes.

6. Domesticated elephants, when strictly registered andvisibly marked as individuals, discourage illegal capture and trade of wildelephants by minimizing sales of captives into the legal domesticatedpopulation.

7. Domesticated elephants can serve as a platform for hands-onresearch directly benefiting the conservation of wild elephants. Reproductivebiology and the determination of subspecies are the most obvious spheres ofresearch, but others include inventing a contraceptive-implanting dart to beused in the control wild birth rates, developing the use of voice prints toidentify and monitor individual wild elephants, etc.

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

Well-managed domesticated populations are of inestimable valueto the wildlife conservation community, and their importance can only growexponentially as wild elephant populations continue to decline. The largerwildlife conservation community should assess the worth of these many benefitsand consider greater participation in the management of domesticatedelephants.

The literature on domesticatedelephants

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

The absence of comprehensive, practical publications relevantto care and use in Asia - whether in logging, animal husbandry, veterinarymedicine, or conservation - is distinctly odd considering that the elephant isthe 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 cultureincluding two of the world’s great religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. TheAsian elephant has until recently also been invaluable to man as a work animaland money-earner, and therein lies the likeliest explanation for the huge gapsin the professional literature. A precipitous decline in the use of elephants intransport and logging has quickly stripped them of their once enormous economicvalue, and consequently there has been no perceived need for books on managingelephants. A more charitable explanation for the lack of publications might bethat extreme cultural differences between keepers cause management systems forelephants to vary with location far more than do keeping systems for the truedomestic animals, thus rendering impossible any book of universalapplicability.

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

The following country profiles comprise a fairly comprehensivereview of the English-language scientific and management literature, directingreaders to all primary sources and most secondary ones. (Indeed, many sourceshave been ‘squeezed’ of most or all of the hard information theycontain.) All documents of worth accessible to the author have been cited, oftenwith a brief attempt to indicate their usefulness.

Little general background on elephants is provided becausegiven the expert audience intended it is assumed that most readers will bereasonably familiar with the elephant’s life history, size, foodrequirements, breeding biology, etc. Supplying background could easily doublethe size of the present work. Some excellent general works are recommended in afootnote.² The most useful background books for a particular countryare briefly ‘reviewed’ in the last paragraph of that countryprofile’s introduction; books specific to a given a subject are recommendedunder that subject.

Supplementary sources

Newspapers and popular periodicals have been consulted andquoted to an unusual extent for a work on management. (Only stories with abyline have been cited.) The popular press is usually the only source ofinformation about topical events such as mahouts killed by elephants, musthbulls being killed by police, etc., and the press is often the only window formonitoring substantive issues such as the activities of NGOs, campaigns tochange law, etc. The author’s guidelines for using newspaper sources havebeen that the story must be noted as such, must appear well-researched, must beconsistent with other sources, and if controversial should be corroborated by ahuman 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 areindicated by giving the person’s name or the year of the interview initalic braces, e. g., {Smith, 1996} or Ghosh {1996}; a list ofpeople interviewed is given in Appendix 1. Much valuable evidence, especiallyfor Thailand, has come from mahouts and elephant owners, the best source ofinformation on illegal capture and trade, prices, preferences for elephants bysex and age, etc. Interviews disguised as casual conservation are the only wayto uncover such elusive issues such as the morale of tribal mahouts or theattitudes of the youngest generation of mahouts.

Domesticated elephants

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

Conventional wisdom often implies but rarely specificallystates that the art and science of elephant-keeping diffused throughout thecontinent from a center in northwest India. Undoubtedly, a great culturaldissemination spread from that area, radiating ever wider with the rise ofaristocratic elephant-keeping cultures across the subcontinent - but that centerwas not neccessarily the source of the first domestication.

The history ofdomestication

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

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

As for the time of first domestication, Mohenjo-Daro isclearly 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 wasundoubtedly in the Palaeolithic when a lost or orphaned calf attached itself toa tribe of hunters; young elephant calves have no instinctive fear of man andare well known for seeking out humans if bereft of elephant society. Thequestion is really how one defines ‘domestication’. How many elephantsmust be kept over what period of time before qualifying as true domestication?Does casually keeping an elephant or two permanently at the edge of campconstitute domestication? Is performance of work a criterion? Is breeding goodnumbers of calves a criterion? (If so, Sri Lanka and India have failed to thisday.) Is selective breeding a criterion? (If so, then to this day the elephanthas never been domesticated in the conventional sense.)

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

The time, place, and nature of the first domestication are allfascinating armchair puzzles. Although ultimately unanswerable, reflection onthese conundrums is not purely intellectual because these questions stimulateproductive thought about human nature, elephant nature, and the tumultuousconfluence of the two.

The animal

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

Physical attributes

Beyond sheer size, still other unique physiologicalcharacteristics differentiate the elephant from other herbivores. The elephantlives longer than any mammal other than man. (Elephants in domesticityconsequently have a very long working life, but only at the expense of a veryslow growth to working age.) The elephant has the longest mammalian gestationperiod, 21-22 months, and a very long reproductive span, with some cows calvingeven past sixty years.

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

Temperament

Beyond the purely physical challenges, suppose thosehypothetical giant horses or oxen or water buffalo were either wild-caught ordirect descendants of wild-caught animals and totally retained their naturalwild 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 thedocile, normal-sized horse has through centuries? Would people continue to keepdogs as pets and work animals if every third dog steadfastly retained athoroughly ‘vicious’, wolf-like demeanour? Clearly not.

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

Far quicker than its bulk would seem to allow, the elephantcan kill with its tusks, its forehead, its trunk (either by striking or liftingand throwing), its mouth (by biting, a favorite of cows), its legs (by stompingor kicking), or any combination thereof. Kicks come in astonishing variety withboth the front and back legs able to kick away from or into the body, the lattera perfect prelude for yet more kicking under the belly. A killing attack oftencomes as a combination of charging, kicking, and head-butting so fast and socoordinated that the three components are inseparable to the eye. Thedomesticated elephant, thoroughly accustomed to man’s presence, isparticularly adept.

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

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

The scientific world greatly frowns on anthropomorphizing, theunobjective belief that animals, particularly wild animals, have emotions orpersonalities. Nonetheless, elephants have certain characteristics which sorelytempt 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, apattern usually interpreted as indicating high intelligence and a complex sociallife. 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 oftoday’s Asian and African elephants to try to clarify the lives of extinctmammoths and mastodonts, says, “Elephants teach each other by behavioralexample and directed communicated messages.... Elephants make a wide variety ofvocalizations to communicate mood, intent, and desire.” Many scientistswould have it that elephants have altruistic feelings, and some scientists havegone so far as to suggest that this altruism sometimes extends beyond elephantsto other species. Clearly, keeping elephants is qualitatively different fromkeeping conventional domestic animals not just because of their unique physicalcharacteristics but also because of their high intelligence.

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

For a manager forced to decide which mahout will ride whichelephant or which bull will mate a skittish cow, elephants clearly do haveindividual temperaments or personalities. Whenever elephant keepers, whetherAsians or Westerners, swap elephant stories they will find an elephantequivalent for everything from the holiest saint to an ax murderer, whether intheir behavior towards humans or even, as is often forgotten, towards otherelephants. The wise manager tries to match the unique behavior of each elephantto each mahout. Assigning the wrong rider can ruin a good elephant, and puttingthe wrong mahout atop the wrong elephant can easily get him killed. Illustratingjust how complex can be the interaction of human temperament and elephanttemperament, Evans (1910) wrote: “I have known the training of a previouslywell-behaved animal to be lost to such a degree that she would endure neitherload nor rider, simply owing to the accident of being placed in the charge of anirascible, fitful keeper, who first negligently indulged, and then wantonlypunished her.”

The keepers

By ‘keepers’ is meant both mahouts and owners.Owners, through orders to their hired mahouts, have great direct effect onelephants by controlling food, scheduling work, etc. The following discussionexamines the keepers from numerous perspectives which influencemanagement.

Mahoutship (I)

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

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

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

The mahout’s perception ofself

Most Westerners nurse a serious misunderstanding of thefundamental mind set of mahouts, at least today’s mahouts in the moredeveloped Asian countries. Inspired by Kipling stories, Sabu films, and the mythof the boy and the calf who spend their whole lives together, Westerners tend tolionize the mahout. Swayed by their own respect, Western researchers oftenassume that mahouts must naturally take pride in their job and theirskills.

Pride of profession was undoubtedly typical in traditionalsocieties. It is easy to imagine the pride of a mahout in the royal elephantcorps or a tribal lad nonchalantly riding a dangerous tusker through thevillage, hoping to be noticed by all the girls. This might be the stuff ofmovies, but it is also the stuff of life; unfortunately, such a sense ofself-worth survives poorly in rapidly developing countries. Whatever self-esteemremains 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 appreciationfrom the larger society. One goal of a recent mahout training course in Keralawas, according to Walker and Cheeran (1996), “to upgrade the image ofmahouts and the profession of mahout both in their own eyes, that of theirowners [employers], and the public.”

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

A Thai mahout known by the author is famous for his ability tocapture musth bulls run amok, a task he accomplishes through skill and physicalprowess but also, it is believed, through ‘charisma’ (baramii)or a powerful mental domination over the elephant. This master mahoutparadoxically has a very low opinion of his own status in the larger society andgenuinely believes that anyone who drives a motor vehicle professionally is hissocial superior. Less anecdotally, the results of an informal poll conducted inThailand 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 andnot a single son intended to do so.

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

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

Management perspectives on thekeepers

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 generalwith relatively few citations and examples, but many specific instances aregiven and analyzed in the country profiles, particularly in“Ownership,” “Mahoutship,” and “Culturaldimensions.”

The institutional perspective

The simplest analytical perspective on keepers from acontemporary management point of view at present is whether a domesticatedelephant is owned by the state or by a private party. All of Asia’s largestelephant-keeping countries have two domesticated subpopulations, privately-ownedelephants and government-owned elephants (mainly belonging to forest departmentsor 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 untilrecently worked primarily in forestry, but lately in Thailand and parts of southIndia many forestry elephants have been put to work in tourism andentertainment, the last alternative of a logging industry lost to deforestation.In Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the government-owned elephants perform no labor atall except for minor work in tourism and, in Indonesia, a few experiments inskidding logs.

Government-owned logging elephants are generally well caredfor and protected, although often there will be some pressure to overwork, as inMyanmar, or problems with diet, as in Sri Lanka. Most government elephants getexcellent veterinary care, and they are very rarely sold. Even where problemsexist, government elephants are under central management and therefore reformprograms should be easy to implement. Across the continent, the biggestmanagement problem with government-owned elephants is a low birth rate, andimproved breeding is easy to achieve - at least from a biological point ofview.

Privately-owned elephants

Privately-owned elephants, on the other hand, are throughoutAsia almost totally neglected from a management perspective even though theyconstitute 80% of the continent’s population. Lair (1986) identified anddiscussed eleven areas in which many if not most privately-owned elephants fareworse than government-owned elephants: manageability, legal status andregistration, identification and documentation, overwork and abuse, veterinarycare, habitat, food and nutrition, employment, economics and human sociology,demographics and social life, and reproduction.

“Presently the near total lack of government influenceover privately-owned elephants is an anachronism in an age when even indeveloping countries nearly everything is taxed, licensed, orcontrolled....,” wrote Lair (1986). No privately-owned elephants have everbenefited from any extensive management program, whether by a nationalgovernment or an international agency. No privately-owned elephants are subjectto any regulatory process beyond the most rudimentary registration procedures;no Asian nation has a licensing program which demands minimal standards ofcompetence from mahouts and minimal standards of care from owners. No Asiancountry meaningfully regulates the buying and selling of elephants within itsboundaries, even, ironically, those countries which have ratified CITES andstrictly regulate external trade.

Very little research of any sort has been done regardingprivately-owned elephants. Professionals and academics conducting research inAsia, particularly Westerners but also nationals of a country, willinstinctively forge links with government elephant institutions so as to gainfunding, easy access to elephants, and qualified local counterparts. While thisnatural partnership between researchers and government facilities is undoubtedlythe most efficient way to conduct pure science, the alliance does nothing toexplore the conditions of privately-owned elephants and their keepers. In everyAsian country there is a desparate need for some intensive research aimed atprivately-owned elephants.

The socio-economic perspective

Three distinct classes of people have hands-on impact onelephants: 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 (‘hiredmahouts’). These three classes hold up quite well in the field, with nearlyall elephant ‘keepers’ falling quite neatly into only one class. Theproportion of elephants owned by mahout-owners and non-mahout owners is oftenculturally based and varies widely between countries and even regions withincountries. Non-mahout owners must employ hired mahouts, and thus these twoclasses are totally interdependent, often unhappily. Each class of keeper, oftenof different social status, naturally has its own perceptions of elephants andits own standards of care.

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

Owner-mahouts

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

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

Hired mahouts

Hired mahouts are the next easiest class of keeper about whichto generalize. Wherever hired mahouts are found there is likely to besignificant abuse, particularly where there is poor supervision from owners.Sloth is endemic, and many hired mahouts are too lazy or too resentful to spendthe large amount of time and energy needed to ensure that elephants are properlyfed and watered. Evans (1910) states that “the class of men usuallyattending 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 andsystematic checks can alone prevent malpractices.” Most hired mahouts workunder some sort of incentive system (piece rate or a wage with bonuses past awork quota) so they will tend to overwork the elephant, particularly since itdoes not belong to them. If a conscientious owner tries to limit the work, themahout will often surrepitiously seek outside jobs, thus cutting dangerouslyinto the elephant’s rest and feeding time. Kindness is, of course, to befound. Some cultures (the Karen) might be intrinsically kind, some hired mahoutsare individually kind, and some hired mahouts are kind because they are verystrictly supervised - but, generally speaking, hired mahouts are prone tomistreat elephants. Occasionally a hired mahout might even physically chastisean elephant to get revenge on a hated owner. The relationship between hiredmahout and owner is often superficially polite but antagonistic under thesurface.

In recent years a largely new class of hired mahouts hasarisen, at least in Thailand and south India: young men with absolutely no priorexperience with elephants. Not surprisingly, neophyte mahouts pose manyproblems, 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 arefamilies which for endless generations kept, bought, sold, hired, and rented outelephants. Usually of high social class, traditional owners are well versed inelephants and usually quite kind to them, often for deeply ingrained culturalreasons. Unfortunately, while traditional owners seem to be a dying breed,nouveau riche owners seem to be proliferating in all the more developedcountries, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka. Mostly local businessmen withnew-found fortunes in real estate, logging, rice mills, and the like, nouveauriche owners buy elephants for what to them is pocket change. Sometimes purelystatus hungry, sometimes kind-hearted, nouveau riche owners nearly always spelltrouble for elephants because inexperienced owners, no matter howwell-intentioned, invariably lack the expertise needed to supervise their hiredmahouts.

The cultural perspective

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

The tribal traditions

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

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

Pondering the origins and evolution of the keeping of wildelephants in domesticity, it is clear that the earliest practice must have beendone by tribal peoples. Even at Mohenjo-Daro, it was surely tribal people whocaptured the elephants, not the dominant-culture artisans who made the famousclay seals which constitute the evidence. Tribal people everywhere pre-datedominant 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 and700 BC), Lahiri-Choudhury (1991b) wrote, “Experts in [elephant] warfare are[described as] aboriginal hunting-fishing tribes, most of whom come from thefringes of the area of Aryan settlement in northern India, and some areexpressly identified as hunters belonging to non-Aryan tribes.”

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

Tribal cultures were the only significant traditionalelephant-keeping cultures to survive intact for long past World War II, but eventribal keepers suffered development-related damage to the environment and toculture. Deforestation in many countries - particularly Thailand, south India,and Sri Lanka - over a few decades eliminated both many food sources forelephants and many jobs for their owners. A decreased financial incentive tokeep elephants caused a fall in numbers, while a parallel decline in theprestige 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 countryprofiles, has been catastrophic in those countries which have avoidedinternational war and embraced development: Thailand, Sri Lanka, and much ofIndia. Tribal traditions still exist in Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam but thenumber of keepers is so small as to pose a threat to viability. Only Myanmar andnortheast India have intact, sizeable tribal traditions.

Tribal elephant-keeping cultures often appear robust whileactually being deceptively fragile. Any tribal culture is comprised of twofunctionally interlinked components, the spiritual and the technical. Spiritualcomponents includes all of the cosmology, magic, and ritual, while techniqueincludes practical skills such as training, tying knots, health care, etc. In atraditional context the spiritual and technical elements are totallyinseparable, but modern influences have robbed the spiritual of much of itspower. Without a spiritual foundation tribal systems of keeping elephantssurvive poorly.

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

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

The palace traditions

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

Elephant-keeping aristocracies in ancient Asia closelyresembled the great chivalric kingdoms in medieval Europe, for example, andmasterful mahoutship was easily as important as horsemanship was in the West.(Lahiri-Choudhuri [1995] implies that as far back as Neolithic times theelephant might have played in the tropics the role that the horse played intemperate climes.) Every young noble was expected to vigorously practice the artof elephant warfare and specifically to master mounted single combat. Much ofthe ceremony and metaphysical trappings of palace traditions was everywhereinfluenced culturally by ideas from India, but much cultural content was also ofpurely 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 inwarfare, the keepers of war elephants - both battle elephants and transportelephants - were organized in a military chain of command, with the mahoutsbeing privates and kings being generals. (The vague term ‘warelephant’, used by many writers, has created endless misunderstandingbecause most ‘war elephants’ were non-combatant transport animals,with only a few being actual ‘battle elephants’.) Palace elephantdepartments boasted large full-time staffs with little work to do except toperfect their craft under the close supervision of demanding and competitivearistocrats whose goal was to produce elephants superior to those of theirpeers. One Thai king was described (Wood, 1926) as “always either in theforest hunting elephants, or in his palace, attending to state affairs.”(This ruler, King Narai, was on his deathbed usurped by Phra Petracha - thegeneral in command of his war elephants [Sitsayamkan, 1967]).

Indian miniatures and pictorial art portray an exquisite useof ropes and hardware. A miniature by Zain al-’Abidin, c. 1600, shows abull elephant with two sets of restraint gear, one to discourage flight andanother to stop it once begun; another miniature of c. 1590 shows the EmperorAkbar inspecting a newly caught elephant with beautifully tied ropes holding itto a tree. If such sophistication was reached with hardware, then it must beassumed 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 whenfirearms and artillery first reached Asian battlefields. Still, the end of theuse of elephants in actual combat had very little impact on domesticatedpopulations numerically. Even after losing their value as an actual weapon, allpotential battle elephants were still retained for ceremony or as transport anddraft animals, jobs which probably employed easily twenty times the number ofbattle elephants. Palace traditions plummeted disastrously only with the comingof colonialization, whereupon royalty realized that they must fight with modernweapons and modern transport; elephants quickly became a useless and expensiveheirloom. The princes’ loss of interest brought a decline of funds andmanpower and, more telling, a loss of supervision from on high - in effect, amass desertion of the officer corps which is felt to this day.

Mostly gone in the 19th century, only a few palace traditionssurvived past World War II, primarily through the pilkhanas (elephantstables) 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 indetail, and certainly the aristocrats felt no compulsion to record specifictechniques for posterity. (Of an attempt to research medieval Europeanhorse-keeping technique so as to recreate a crusader’s journey, Severin[1990] wrote, “Those who once travelled great distances rarely wrote downthe practical details because they seemed so obvious. Day-to-day techniques werea part of their lives, and they certainly did not expect anybody else to have tostudy them.”) Most writings were poetic or metaphysical, and only a fewworks such as the Hasthividyarnava or the Arthashastra give any specific detailsof hands-on technique. Today, the vast bodies of practical knowledge ofAsia’s many different palace traditions have vanished forever, the onlyremnant being the memories of a few old men. Certainly nowhere has enoughknowledge of the old keeping techniques survived to even approach reconstructinga single palace tradition.

What was lost? The grandeur is missed, although that hardlymatters management-wise. Undoubtedly many forgotten keeping and trainingtechniques would be of great interest, but there are both surviving alternativesand modern techniques to compensate for lost technique. The truly irreplaceableloss brought by the passing of palace traditions was the loss of centralmanagement and sophisticated supervision. Besides superb supervision of theirown elephant stables, palace traditions probably disseminated standards andrules embodied in distinct systems which were widely shared across aregion.

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

In all of Asia only Indonesia, the newcomer to elephantkeeping, has a chance to emulate the past - odd but fitting, since Indonesia hadvarious palace traditions which vanished only in the late 19th century.Indonesia presently possesses three of the four essential ingredients for apalace tradition: large numbers of elephants, central control, and a managementenvironment which allows for producing ideal elephants. Indonesia conspicuouslylacks the fourth ingredient, sophisticated traditional knowledge taught andsupervised by expert managers, but perhaps sophisticated modern knowledge couldbe introduced to stand in tradition’s stead.

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

The dominant-culture keepers

There must once have been a middle ground between the palacetraditions and the tribal traditions, and it is fascinating to speculate on thenature of the linkage. The most perplexing question is clearly the degree ofparticipation of mahouts and owners who were ‘dominant-culturekeepers’, that is members of the civilization or race of the palace but notclosely affiliated with the palace. To what extent did ethnic Burmese commoners- and Indians, Thais, Khmers, Vietnamese, etc. - work as mahouts? To probe theobscure history of dominant-culture keeping, a useful device is to briefly painttwo plausible extremes. Readers should feel free to add whatever embellishmentsor objections they wish.

In the first scenario, tribal traditions were so prevalentthat there was little need for dominant-culture mahouts. Everywhere except SriLanka there were plenty of elephant-keeping tribal peoples who were highlymobile and able to travel long distances for work. Some tribals worked in thestables of the aristocracy as hired hands. (To this day men of the Kui tribe arethe keepers of the King of Thailand’s white elephants.) Writingparticularly of south India, Krishnamurthy and Wemmer (1995a) say “The useof tribal people as elephant handlers clearly pre-dated the establishment ofelephant camps by the British. Indian people evidently relied on tribals as asource of jungle expertise, and to capture and train elephants....” Men ofthe dominant culture preferred work in agriculture and the trades, shunning aprofession left largely to what was perceived as inferior peoples. Manydominant-culture families were involved with elephants but mainly as powerfulowners and brokers employing large numbers of tribal mahouts. In northeast Indiait was possible for dominant-culture managers to run huge operations employingtribal mahouts, as described by Milroy (1922) or Stracey (1963); Shand (1995)gives a more subjective glimpse of how such a dual-class system workedsocially.

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

The balance of tribal and dominant-culture mahouts must liesomewhere between these two extremes, and there is not enough hard evidence toprove or disprove either hypothesis. The balance between tribal anddominant-culture mahouts has also surely varied regionally, with many regionsdominated by either tribal or dominant-culture keepers and other regions holdinga mix.

Many unexplored questions are posed by today’s remainingdominant-culture keepers, particularly their origins, in the more developedcountries. Are they remnants of a palace tradition? Are some long assimilatedtribals? What are their motives for keeping elephants? Are many dominant-culturemahouts are simply opportunistic newcomers? How skilful are they compared totribal mahouts?

Conclusions: The cultural perspective

The many palace elephant-keeping traditions have vanishedforever, and the palace traditions’ last spiritual heirs, the great forestdepartments, are in terminal decline except in Myanmar. Many tribalelephant-keeping traditions have died away and the surviving traditions areseverely threatened everywhere except probably Myanmar and northeast India.Except possibly Myanmar, dominant-culture keepers, at least those of long familylineage, are clearly on the wane.⁴ Who, then, is taking care ofAsia’s domesticated elephants?

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

When culture fails to motivate, the only possible reason forkeeping elephants is to make money, and where the only motivation is money, thequality of care usually falls abysmally. When there is little or no money to bemade, elephants will be deserted as a useless burden, probably fondly rememberedby 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 timeI have had abundant opportunities for observing elephants and their treatment bymasters and mahouts, has compelled me to believe that in many instances (and Isay so with reluctance) a maximum of labour is exacted with a minimum regardbestowed upon their wants and creature comforts - in other words, they are‘sweated’.” A life spent skidding logs often consists of endlessdrudgery 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 inthis branch of the industry is probably from 10 to 20 per cent.”

The elephant’s loss of utility results from the loss oftwo major paying jobs, logging and transport. Logging is the best known and mostobvious type of lost work - actually now in the last throes of a lingering deatheverywhere except Myanmar. Elephant logging has become famous largely because itwas so vividly described and romanticised by a few Teak Wallah authors, but froma historical perspective the vast teak industry of colonial days was a minor,short-lived, and virtually overnight aberration. Historically, skidding a logwas 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 moreobscure type of lost work, transporting goods and people over rough terrain,everywhere employed far more elephants than ever did logging, perhaps by afactor of twenty or thirty. The elephant sounds a most unlikely pack animal formountains and swamps, but, while a bit slow, elephants are astonishinglysure-footed, as delightfully pictured by Brock (1884) describing a tortuous tripin northern Thailand: “I had ample opportunity of noting the sureness offoot of the elephants, which seemed quite to enjoy the excitement of climbingand descending the steep acclivities, mounting rugged slopes where a goat wouldseem hardly to find a foothold, and sliding down-hill on their bellies, withtheir forelegs spread straight out in front, and their hind legs behind, with aself-command that a mule, using all his legs, might have envied.” Thepeculiar anatomy of the elephant’s foot makes it probably the only draftanimal which is equally adept on both steep hillsides and soft, muddyground.

At the turn of the century in Thailand there were said to be20,000 transport elephants used around Chiang Mai alone, and that was just partof a haulage web which spanned the whole region. Most of South and SoutheastAsia enjoyed similarly vast networks, most of which must have interconnected tosome degree. Today, though in much smaller numbers, transport elephants remainirreplaceable in roadless country, especially during the rainy season, inMyanmar, northeast India, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

As will be seen, in the more developed countries a lack ofemployment is everywhere a grave threat facing owners and thus ultimatelyelephants. Lair (1986) wrote, “Owners primarily concerned with profit willtend to divest themselves of elephants once they no longer make money.” Thebottom line for the mahout-owner is the survival of his family, and when thatcannot be guaranteed elephants will be sold, if possible, or evenreleased.

· See“Employment (II),” page 252.

Numbers of domesticated elephants inAsia

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 populationsin the last century. Indonesia is presently reintroducing the tradition byestablishing a new elephant culture which began with the hiring of Thai mahoutsas teachers and the use of Thai khoonkies to help capture wildelephants.

The available numbers for national populations in Asia rangewidely 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 hasechoed through the literature for twenty years. Olivier (1978a) referred to oneearly estimate of wild elephants in Thailand as a “tentative informedguess,” a fair description of many of the numbers available aboutdomesticated 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 incountry profiles.

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

Possible high numbers of elephants are difficult to estimatebecause even in those countries with registration procedures, significantnumbers 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 ofterritory largely beyond government reach. In Thailand registration methods arelax enough that a significant number of elephants go unregistered.

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

Table 3 lists key parameters of domesticated elephants bycountry in order of the likely number of domesticated elephants. Given whereavailable are the numbers of government-owned and privately-owned elephants, thenumber of surveyed and registered elephants, probable high and low numbers, andthe most likely number between them. A plausible number for wild elephants isfollowed by the ratio of domesticated elephants to wild elephants.

Affinities between countries withdomesticated elephants

National domesticated elephant populations sometimes sharecharacteristics with other countries. Below are discussed five mostly unrelatedaffinities: the size of national populations, the domesticated-to-wild elephantratio, a cultural and religious divide, the effect of development, andimportance in conservation. These diverse subjects well illustrate the complexnature and divergences of national populations.

Size of nationalpopulations

In terms of numbers, there is very obviously a ‘bigthree’: Myanmar, Thailand, and India collectively hold about 13,200elephants or 80% of the total in Asia. Each of these countries has domesticatedelephants which outnumber any of the second-tier countries by a factor of atleast 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 Indiaput together. Myanmar has even greater importance than its overwhelming numberssuggest because it the only large population which enjoys largely intact habitatand intact traditional keeping conditions.

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

Numbers of elephants are in any case only suggestive, notdiagnostic, of the health of a domesticated population. A population of 100elephants with a normal number of animals of breeding age (mirroring thepopulation structure of a healthy wild population) has infinitely morereproductive value than 500 elephants of a very high median age, such as thenearly moribund population in Europe (Kurt, 1994). Unfortunately, in Asia thereis no hard data and only a few casual expert opinions, but it is safe to assumethat 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. Thesecountries historically made up the shortfall by recruiting young captives fromthe wild, but that infusion of youth has everywhere been lost with bans oncapture; if the low birth rates remain static, the median age must rise higheras numbers fall lower with every passing year from the last captives.

The domesticated-to-wild elephantratio

Olivier (1978a) frequently uses past high numbers ofdomesticated elephants to argue for past high numbers of wild elephants; he doesso for the recent past in Thailand and Burma anddummytable 3also for the distantpast, particularly for parts of India. He writes, “I am sure that theenormous stocks of tame elephants once held there [India], reflect wild elephantpopulations whose size would appear far out of proportion with any remainingtoday.”

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-ownedelephants, including state enterprises; ‘Private’ meansprivately-owned elephants.

³ ‘Survey’ means elephants are eitherregistered 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 singlefigure is required.

⁴ The arithmetical mean of the high and lowestimates in Table 1 (Dr. Charles Santiapillai. pers. comm., 1996). The singlenumber implies no precision but is needed to compare wild and domesticatedelephants in the following column.

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

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

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

Countries with very high domesticated-to-wild elephant ratiosare 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 veryhigh simply because poaching, war, and rapid habitat destruction have killed -not captured - so many wild elephants as to dramatically and quickly elevate thedomesticated subpopulation’s share of the total population. The second andmore interesting case involves countries where high domesticated-to-wild ratioshave been much longer evolving and where most of man’s decimation of wildelephants has been captures rather than kills. Myanmar’s domesticatedelephant population is equal to about 95% of the country’s probable wildpopulation, which, considering the low birth rate and known high recentcaptures, argues overwhelmingly for massive past exploitation of manygenerations of wild elephants. Thailand’s large domesticated elephantpopulation constitutes a phenomenal 280% of the probable number of wildelephants.

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

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

Very little biodata exists to clarify the extent and exactrole which capture has played in creating the demographics of currentpopulations, although a stab might be taken for Myanmar, where an on-goinganalysis of elephant log books might reveal much evidence. Many inevitablequestions are unanswerable. How many of today’s domesticated elephants werewild-caught? How many years ago were they captured? How old were they atcapture? Could the average age of domesticated elephants in Thailand be veryhigh because of many survivors of massive captures four or five decadesago?

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

The cultural divide

The elephant-keeping countries of Asia comprise twogeographically distinct groups separated also by religion and culture, whatmight loosely be called a Hindu bloc and a Buddhist bloc. (These blocscorrespond closely with the geographic and geopolitical terms, ‘SouthAsia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’.) The Hindu or Brahminic bloc is SriLanka 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 betotally extraneous to the cultural divide on the mainland; Bangladesh andMalaysia are Muslim but their populations are too small and too anomalous to berelevant.)

Caste pervades elephant keeping in the Hindu bloc, with eventribal mahouts in south and north India mostly working for and under the styleof high-caste Hindus. Sri Lanka is, of course, a predominantly Buddhist countryand virtually all mahouts and owners are Buddhist; the elephant keeping,however, remains steadfastly Hindu in its essentials, based on Brahminiccosmology and a strict caste system. Despite the great religious significance ofelephants in Sinhalese Buddhism, hands-on elephant keeping shares far moreculturally with neighboring south India than with fellow Buddhist countries farto the east.

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

The Hindu-Buddhist elephant-keeping schism is highlysubjective in many aspects but nonetheless very tangible when relating withmahouts in the field. Hindu and Buddhist mahouts and owners have differentculturally inculcated beliefs, including different styles and philosophies ofelephant keeping. There seems to be a more direct, emotional connection betweenman and elephant in the Buddhist east and a more distant but no less masterfulman-elephant relationship in the Hindu bloc.

Beyond such abstractions, the Hindu bloc suffers threeculturally-induced problems which will in three observable ways confront anymodern management scheme in the field. First, the Hindu bloc has rigid castesystems which, at least in modern times, lower the mahouts’ self esteem andthus create a peculiar personnel problem. Second, the Hindu bloc has a very highproportion of hired mahouts compared to mahouts who own the elephants they ride,a situation which often brings poor care to elephants. Third, and mostquantifiable, the elephants kept in the Hindu bloc have much lower birth ratesthan those kept in the Buddhist nations to the east. The Hindu bloc’salmost total lack of births arises from ancient metaphysical inhibitions andprohibitions. (Low birth rates and the probable cultural causes are discussed inthe country profiles for India and Sri Lanka.) Most Buddhist and tribal elephantkeepers at least allow breeding and many encourage breeding, so that birth ratesin the Buddhist east, while not self-sustaining, are on the whole reasonablygood.

Development and itseffects

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

When assessing potential international management effortsaimed at common problems, development and its effects dictates the most usefulgroupings of countries.

Myanmar is a bloc unto itself, the world’s largestnational population of domesticated elephants in the habitat least damaged bydevelopment.

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

Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka, all relatively developedcountries, have enjoyed relatively stable governments and avoided the horrors ofinternational war, all the while working to develop their economy. Peacefuldevelopment has, however, brought extreme environmental degradation in all threecountries, greatly reducing food sources for elephants and work opportunitiesfor their owners. All three domesticated elephant populations are apparentlygrowing moribund; capture has been banned to protect wild elephants, and birthrates are too low to sustain numbers, particularly in India and Sri Lanka. Allthree countries are also suffering a severe, development-induced decline in thequality of mahoutship. On the positive side, however, peaceful development hasbrought Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka a free press, a well-informed and vocalmiddle class, and, more recently, NGOs powerful or influential enough to goadand guide lethargic government agencies into action.

Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam - or ‘Indo-China’ -have many contiguous borders and, not surprisingly, face similar problems. Allthree countries have small and poorly known domesticated elephant populationsrecently ravaged by the horrors of war - and all three are now being hurt bypost-war development. (The decades-long Indo-China conflict brought greatphysical destruction, but it might have preserved forests and thereby savedtribal cultures; war is far less destructive of culture than is development.)The Indo-China countries seem to now be receiving the worst of development whilestill lacking orderly development’s partially compensating benefits; farmore quickly than did their neighbors, Lao PDR, Cambodia, and Vietnam will getdams, skidders, chainsaws, and roads, but without the benefit of plentifultrained scientists, without an active media, and without progressive anddedicated NGOs.

Importance inconservation

From an animal husbandry perspective, Myanmar is the jewel inthe crown. A pragmatist concerned solely with preserving large, sustainablenumbers of domesticated elephants and not caring about national heritage or thefate of local genotypes might well decide to pour all available resources intoMyanmar and let the other countries decline without support. Indonesia is ofconservation importance far beyond its sizeable and steadily growing numbersbecause its elephants are almost entirely government-owned and thus extremelymanageable as a group.

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

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