Asia's Elephant Wars - Sri Lanka's Elephant Today

AGE-OLD BONDS: In Kandy, Sri Lanka, an elephant participates in the annual Festival of the Tooth--which features a procession carrying Buddha's tooth. Since they were domesticated some 4,000 years ago, elephants have played major roles in culture and everyday life throughout Asia. Today such relationships are eroding. Says one expert, "We in India have had a tradition of interaction with elephants going back millennia, and now man has decided to destroy it."

For their part, elephants are no slouches when it comes to consumption. Each day, a single adult spends up to 18 hours munching down more than 500 pounds of grasses, roots, leaves, bark and fruits--the equivalent in weight to a human eating 1,000 steaks. The animal also gulps more than 30 gallons of water a day as it scours the landscape like a mechanical harvester.

Given the ravenous appetites of both species, and the resulting battles over dwindling resources, casualties have been high on both sides. In India--which houses Asia's single largest wild elephant population--some 200 people are killed by elephants annually, while 120 to 150 elephants die at the hands of Homo sapiens. Throughout the continent, understandably angry rural residents electrocute the animals with high-tension wires or fell them with guns, poison-tipped arrows and rice wine--an elephant favorite--laced with insecticides. Poachers and human-induced accidents add to the toll.

It's no wonder that little remains of an Asian elephant empire that once stretched from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Yellow River in northern China. According to WWF and IUCN--The World Conservation Union, only about 35,000 to 45,000 Asian elephants survive in the wild today, less than a tenth the estimated total of their better-known cousins, the African elephants. Countries such as India, Myanmar (Burma), Indonesia and Sri Lanka still house greatly diminished but viable populations, while prospects for long-term survival in impoverished and war-scarred Indochina--Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia--are gloomy. In the past decade alone, elephant numbers have plunged by as much as 95 percent to fewer than 80 individuals in Vietnam. The animals have long vanished from West Asia and all but a small southern corner of China. Altogether, the Asian elephant inhabits some 169,885 square miles today, an area roughly the size of Sweden.

Beyond body counts, what is most tragic about the decline of the Asian elephant is that for thousands of years the animal has played a significant role in culture, religion and daily life throughout Asia. Today those age-old bonds are about to snap. In the words of D.K. Lahiri-Choudhury, an elephant expert for IUCN--The World Conservation Union, "We in India have had a tradition of interaction with elephants going back millennia, and now man has decided to destroy it."

Carved seals from the Indus Valley showing elephants with cloth draped over their backs suggest that the species was domesticated at least 4,000 years ago. The animals proved useful to rich and poor alike. A humble peasant might use an elephant to journey through otherwise impassable jungle while his king marshaled the creatures for battle against enemies or ordered them to stomp criminals to death.

But one by one, the elephant lost its jobs--as truck, battle tank, palace pet and, most recently, logger. Only in Myanmar, with nearly half of Asia's 15,000 captive elephants, are the animals still used to haul felled trees over trackless terrain, an ironic situation in which elephants help destroy the very forests upon which their survival depends. Elsewhere, the once prized possession and status symbol increasingly becomes an economic burden to its owner. One of the most pathetic sights in Bangkok is an elephant tramping through polluted streets, trunk extended, begging for money it can no longer earn for its master in the countryside.

Elephants still play a role in Asian religions. One of the most popular Hindu gods is the elephant-headed Ganesha, who, as "God of Wisdom and Remover of Obstacles," is worshipped at the start of important endeavors. Shrines devoted to Ganesha still dot the region today. Among Buddhists, white elephants figure prominently. While she was pregnant with Gautama Buddha, for example, his mother dreamed that a white elephant entered her side. She was told it was a sign that she would give birth to a great man.

Despite the creatures' traditional importance, Asian elephants long have been subjected to violence by hunters who seek their ivory, meat, hides or merely the adrenaline rush of killing such large and powerful animals. "Nagaland has turned its elephant population into steaks. It's meat on the hoof for many Mizos," says Lahiri-Choudhury of this northeastern Indian state where tribal groups still eat the animal's meat. Ivory poaching is even more widespread, with gunmen--often backed by illegal syndicates--stalking tuskers inside national parks and penetrating even remote refuges such as Cambodia's Cardamon Mountains. Conducting a preliminary survey in the region, Flora and Fauna International discovered that at least five animals were recently slain for their tusks by Cambodian and Thai soldiers armed with high-powered rifles. Largely spared human incursions while the country suffered through decades of war, the Cardamons are one of Indochina's last elephant strongholds.