Posted on behalf of George Wigmore.
The first full count of wild elephants in Sri Lanka in over a century has come under fire from conservation groups who were supposed to be taking part in the project after wildlife minister SM Chandrasena was quoted saying that any strong, young elephants found in the census would be given to temples, and put to work.
As sacred animals in Sri Lanka, tamed elephants have long been used for cultural pageants at Buddhist and Hindu temples, along with carrying out heavy lifting, and acting as a means of domestic transportation.
Due to start today, the count is part of a bid to introduce new conservation polices and reduce human-elephant conflicts, which have increased as Sri Lanka’s forest cover has decreased from 41% to 20% over the past 80 years. Currently estimated as numbering between 5,000 and 7,000, the decline in forests has meant that elephants are increasingly struggling for food, resulting in occasional clashes with humans, with many elephants killed by farmers protecting their crops.
While initially wildlife groups supported the project, committing vehicles and manpower, the comments made by Chandrasena have caused outrage, leading them to boycott the census. Rukshan Jayawardene, chairman of the Wildlife Conservation Forum, reportedly said “this [census] is actually a smokescreen to capture wild elephants when they are young and basically take them for domestication". But despite the protests, the census will go ahead.
“We are against capturing of wild elephants to tame them. The best solution is to encourage elephant owners to breed elephants,” Shantha Jayaweera, the coordinator of the Elephant Conservation Forum told the Sri Lankan Sunday Observer.
Due to their long gestation and suckling periods, many owners of tamed elephants make little effort to breed them. But, say conservation groups, taking elephants from the wild does not provide a sustainable solution to the aging temple elephant population, especially as wild populations continue to decline from those recorded last century.
Image courtesy of Speed of Light Photography via Flickr under Creative Commons.