Elephants in Sri Lanka

One of the great pleasures of a visit to Sri Lanka is the sight of domesticated elephants. You come upon them quite often and quite by surprise. Traveling the winding lanes of the arid north central region, you round a bend and there is a mahout bathing a troupe of elephants in a muddy pond. In the city of Kandy, an elephant strides the streets carrying a huge bundle of freshly chopped tree foliage in its trunk. On the beach at Bentota, an elephant tolerantly carries two European women tourists riding bareback then sits to let them slide down to earth in a burst of shrieks and yells.

Elephants are indigenous to Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan species, fittingly known to science as elephas maximus maximus, is the largest of the Asian elephants, the male having a height of up to 3.5 metres and a weight of up to five tonnes. There are widely varying estimates on the number of elephants in the wild today, from as low as 2,000 to as high as 3,500, but whatever the figure it is vastly below that for the 19th century. Domesticated elephants today number somewhere between 400 and 600. This figure is also somewhat vague because not all elephants are registered in line with the official system.

Elephant keeping has at least a 2,600 year history in Sri Lanka. Historical accounts of international trade in elephants begin at that time, in the sixth century BC. As far away as the Greco-Roman world, Alexander recognised the superiority of Sri Lankan elephants and they were exported to the Romans from 200 BC or before. Aristocrats have always been the principal elephant owners in Sri Lanka, royalty above all. As long ago as the third century AD, the king kept an Elephant establishment as a department of state. The king owned the supply too: in royal times, all wild elephants were the property of the crown.

Elephants were used in war, in startling quantity: 2,200 were said to have taken part in a single battle in 1588. in 1675, a European resident noted their superb quality: "These (elephants) are finer and more docile than in other countries. Therefore they catch a great many of them which they make tame and fit for war, and send them to the kingdoms of Persia, Surat, the Great Mogul, and other places..." In 1681, king Rajasingha II was said to have had hundreds of elephants in his stables.

Elephants were bred in captivity but also continuously supplemented by the taking of animals from the wild. The age-old method was the kraal, driving wild elephants out of the forest and channelling them into a timber-walled stockade from which they could not escape. Then they were tamed and trained. The last kraal capture was in 1950. It is necessary to obtain an official licence for capturting elephants, and decreasing numbers were issued after Sri Lanka's independence from Britain in 1948.

Great changes also occurred after independence in land ownership and use, both of which strongly affected the elephant population. The forests were increasingly logged, which gave plenty of emplyment for elephants while it lasted, but - sadly for the faithful pachyderms - the deforestation eventually eliminated most of the employment in log dragging and lifting, and drastically curtailed the natural environment. The great aristocratic estates were broken up, bringing influxes of poor farmers and human pressure on the wild elephant habitat, and diminishing the ability of the aristocrats to keep elephants.

Today, the great majority of working elephants are found in the region which also has the most dense human population, the south-west, and more than half of the number are found in the busy central strip that runs from the modern capital, Colombo, to the old royal capital of Kandy. This combination derives from a combination of factors: environmental, economic and cultural. Food and water are plentiful in the area, there is paying work for the animals, and there are many wealthy families who keep elephants as symols of their status.

Historically, elephants were chiefly employed in trasporting goods and people over rough terrain. In the past, Sri Lanka was heavily forested and had few roads: elephants were a useful means of transport for those who could afford it. Most military elephants were transporters, carrying supplies or dragging cannons, while a chosen few found glory as battle elephants for the princes and generals. Elephants were employed in lifting, dragging or carrying work of various kinds, such as in building work where they dragged boulders or cut stones, or assisted in the excavation of earth. The great tmeples and tank reservoirs of ancient Sri Lanka owe much to elephant labour.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, under colonial rule, logging became a major employment. The elephant is ideally suited to the task. A creature of the forest, it knows how to negotiate the terrain; immensely strong, it can lift and drag heavy logs like no other animal. In a cruel irony, it was employed to participate in the destruction of the forests which once sheltered it. Ceremonial duties completed the gamut of work: taking part in religious parades, gorgeously caparisoned.

Employment for elephants today is, not surprisingly, rather differen. Military duties, other than ceremonial, vanished long ago: the tank, with its own potent trunk, has replaced the jumbo at the sharp end of battle. Automoiles, trains and planes have taken virtually all the transport jobs, but tourism has stepped in with new forms of work, providing about 30 percent of employment. Participation in religious and other ceremonies happily continues to be significant, offering approximately a further third of all work available. Logging and various other forms of labour involving lifting, carrying and dragging provide the biggest category of employment at roughly 40 percent.

Elephants are still used in forestry in the low level of logging that persists. There they continue the age-old work of dragging logs, or log skidding, using chains attached to a harness, taking cut timber from inaccessible forest locations to roads or rivers from where the logs can be transported in quantity by truck or barge. Elephants are extremely valuable in such work, doing no damage to natural resources and directly assisting sustainable forest harvesting, by distinct contrast with mechanised transport. Logging accounts for about 15 percent of all work available, with another 25 percent provided by a wide variety of labouring tasks. In contruction, work such as lifting beams and dragging equipment is performed. In agriculture, elephants plough fields and trasport crops, among other jobs. In road works, tasks include pulling rollers and graders, and crushing rocks.

In tourism, elephants perform shows, pose for photos and give rides, largely in the beach resorts of the south-west coast, or at institutions such as Colombo's Dehiwela Zoo. The work is perhaps not the most dignified emplyment, but one likes to think that the elephants recognise the affection in which they are held by tourists, both foreigh and local. One of the greatest tourist attractions, even though it wasn't planned that way, is undoubtedly the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage, an institution which has become prominent in the preservation of Sri Lanka's elephants in domesticity.

If labouring is plain hard work and tourism duties are rather below such a majestic beast, elephas maximu s maximus gest the honour it is due when it takes part in the vibrant ceremonies of ancient Sri Lankan tradition. In particula, Buddhist temples hold peraheras or processions, once a year, and the most improtant ones are splendid affairs to which elephant owners hire out their animals or, in the case of the wealthy, contribute animals for prestige and merit. In an ancient tradition, major Buddhist temples such as Kandy's Temple of the Tooth actually receive donations of elephants from well-wishers and those wishing to gain merit. The animals are then kept in the monks'permanent care.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the domesticated Sri Lankan elephant reaches his apotheosis in the Esala Perahera at Kandy. The most spectaular elephant show in Sri Lanka, and most likely the whole world, this event is held each July or August, typically featuring 60 or 70 gloriously apparelled animals amid thousands of costumed paraders with huge crowds of spectators lining the route. The tree-hour long procession of musicians, dancers, dignitaries and elephants is climaxed by the Maligawa tusker, a huge tusked elephant adorned in rich cloth, spangled with tiny lights, carrying an illuminated howdah containing the replica of the golden dagoba shaped casket in which the sacred tooth relic of Lord Buddha is enshrined.

Despite such honours, the working elephant in Sri Lanka is now not in the best of circumstances. Their numbers are in steady decline, with captive births rare and few being captured in the wild. The median age is high and the quality of management and care is plummeting. The 1997 book, Gone Astray, published by the UN food and Agriculture Organisation, attributes this to major problems such as a precipitous decline in mahout skills and inadequate veterinary facilities, which treaten the ling-term survival of Sri Lanka's domestic elephants.

Even as growing mechanisation deprives the elephant of much of its work, and management deficiencies threaten its health, two factors would still seem to ensure a continuing working population. One is tourism, for a visit to Sri Lanka is becoming synonymous with elephantine treats such as a joyful excursion to Pinnewalwa and a fun ride on the beach. Elephants will always be one of Sri Lanka's key attractions for the intercontinental tourist, a sine qua non of the island's character in the minds of people from distant pachydermless lands.

The other factor is religion. Elephants are crucial to the grand traditional ceremonies of Sri Lanka. The Kandy Esala Perehera seems to increase in grandeur rather than diminish with each passing year, such is the prestige and national importance of this festival in which magnificent elephants are the key element. The enthusiastic demand of foreigners through tourism and Sri Lankans trough religion should guarantee continued employment for a few hundred elephas maximus maximus.