Sri Lanka launches jumbo initiative to protect tamed elephants

Sri Lanka looks to address complaints of ill-treatment of elephants with new animal protection laws. (Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage)

• New laws ban mahouts from drinking on the job and require all elephants to have a photo ID card; violators could face up to three years in prison

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s new animal protection laws, which ban riders from drinking on the job and require domesticated elephants to have photo identity cards with a DNA stamp, will keep a “check on animal cruelty” on the island nation, experts and officials told Arab News.
Under the upgraded measures, owners or anyone in the custody of domesticated elephants must ensure that the mahout or elephant rider has not “consumed any liquor or harmful drugs while employed,” according to the directive issued earlier this month.
Violators could face up to three years in prison and have their elephants seized by the government.
There are about 200 tamed elephants in Sri Lanka, highly revered and used in religious and cultural events throughout the year, while an estimated 7,500 roam in the wild across the island nation of 22 million people.
However, complaints of ill-treatment and cruelty of the endangered species are rampant, which officials are looking to curb with the latest measures.
“The new rules have been introduced to regularize the tamed elephant population in the island,” Wimalaweera Dissanayake, state minister for wildlife protection, told Arab News.
“They are being implemented to keep a check on animal cruelty and to stop elephants from being stolen from the wild and brought up in sheltered homes,” he added.  
Capturing wild elephants in Sri Lanka is a criminal offense punishable by death, but prosecutions are rare.
The heavily poached pachyderms are prized across the country, where several affluent Sri Lankans, including Buddhist monks, keep them as pets.
Out of the 200 tamed elephants in Sri Lanka, Dissanayake said that nearly 100 are at homes, temples or used for work, while others are at the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage and the Elephant Transit Camp.
“All of these elephants are permanently stationed at these places, except for the animals at the transit camp where abandoned animals are bred and sent back to the wild,” Dissanayake said.
He added that the new laws would ensure owners provide better care for their elephants, which must be registered with biometric identity cards and receive medical checkups every six months.
“The ID cards include four photos, a DNA stamp and a microchip number with details of each elephant’s height, weight and unique characteristics,” Ashraff A. Samad, renowned photographer and journalist in the capital, Colombo, told Arab News.
“Unlike for a person’s photo for an ID card, for an elephant, we have to take photos of its left and right side, including its trunk, forehead and the back, to cover the tail and hind for a comprehensive photo,” he added.
The new law also brings in several regulations for working elephants, including those used in the logging and tourism industries, with the animals’ work restricted to four hours a day and prohibited at night.
Baby elephants can no longer be used for work, even in cultural pageants, and cannot be separated from their mothers.
The new rules also mandate a two-and-a-half-hour bath for all elephants every day, while those used in the tourism industry can not take on more than four people at once and only if they are seated on a padded saddle.
Experts welcomed the government’s latest initiative but with cautious optimism.
“The new rules look good, but the government should not allow political interference in their implementation,” Jayantha Jayewardene, managing trustee of the Biodiversity and Elephant Conservation Trust, told Arab News.
He cited instances where “politicians had interfered with the police after poachers captured animals from the wild.”
“Such offenses should be met with the right punishment,” Jayawardene, who has written three books on elephants, said.
Sri Lanka has long grappled with a human-elephant conflict that kills dozens of animals and people annually.
According to a BBC report last year, Sri Lanka accounted for 361 elephant deaths in 2019, 85 percent of which were attributed to human activity.
There have also been allegations of baby elephants being stolen from national wildlife parks.
“It has been reported that baby elephants are regularly captured from the wild by an organized gang of poachers,” Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando, an elephant expert from the Center for Conservation and Research on Elephants, told Arab News.
“To my knowledge, elephant births only occur at the Pinnawela orphanage. Any claims of elephant births at individual homes cannot be accepted, and it is clear the baby elephants were stolen from the wild,” he added.
To avoid such crimes, the expert suggested that photos of registered elephants should be displayed on the Internet “so that their real owners can identify the stolen animals.”