‘Gone astray’ was during colonial days the standard term entered into the log books of elephants which had escaped, usually by breaking or slipping their chains but sometimes by killing their mahouts. Unless the elephant had the misfortune to be recaptured, ‘Gone astray’ was the log book’s final entry apart from rumoured sightings. (Or, occasionally, a rampaged village.) This quaint and rather wistful term actually suggests professional negligence because too many elephants gone astray indicated a lazy or incompetent manager. ‘Gone astray’, still employed in Myanmar, is used here to connote a passing away from effective human control and care.
“The elephant is probably one of the very few species of mammal whose use to man as a domesticated animal is drawing to a close,” wrote Clutton-Brock (1981). Rather than a peaceful retirement, in those Asian countries which are developing rapidly the elephant’s loss of usefulness in transportation and logging has brought both falling numbers and badly deteriorating keeping conditions. If the domesticated elephant’s plight occurred in broad daylight (as with fur animals caught with leg-hold traps or veal calves or mistreated zoo elephants), it would provoke international protests. Given that domesticated elephants are so widely dispersed, however, the elephant’s senescence is rather a time of quiet crisis and isolated suffering.
One person who read some draft manuscript remarked, “You write as if you have a chip on your shoulder.” The author was surprised but then realized it is true. It is clear to me that in the more developed and thus most threatened countries, the domesticated elephant’s curious dual status - not a true wild animal but also not a true domestic animal - has everywhere left it neglected by governments and lying in an institutional and legal void. The effort needed is beyond the scope of NGOs. The West would happily help but cannot find a handle to do so.
A growing body of people - both scientists and the general public, both Westerners and educated Asians - feel strongly that domesticated elephants are essentially wild animals and simply should not be kept in captivity except, arguably, for a few needed for science and education. As an ideal, the author shares this sentiment entirely. (My first two years with elephants were a passion for wild elephants, hardly being able to look at an elephant in chains.) The unhappy fact remains, however, that there presently are over 16,000 domesticated elephants in Asia, and many of these animals badly need some help.
Gone Astray, after providing background, focuses on highly visible but poorly documented contemporary problems, particularly those with solutions applicable across international borders. Some analysis and some conjecture is given on first steps towards management. Some possibilities initially sound good and can be good - for example, selective logging, captive breeding, and capturing ‘doomed’ wild elephants - but these activities all have a dark side as well. Increased breeding sounds desirable, but what is the purpose (and the fate) of the calves? For science? Conservation? To be traded on the open market? To perform in a circus? To skid logs? To live in isolation? To be ridden by an incompetent mahout?
Gone Astray discusses at length only those few core activities which are indisputably good everywhere and at all times: more research and communications, improved law, fuller registration, and wider, better veterinary care. Surprising opportunities exist for some ‘macro-management’ of large numbers of elephants.
Writing about the management of domesticated elephants poses many hazards and painful choices in regard to sources, vocabulary, and point of view. This book began with the author determined to strictly follow the dictates of scientific writing but realizing midway that such rigors were inappropriate for two reasons: pressing contemporary problems and the multidisciplinary nature of those problems. (One could also add the scantiness of the literature.)
First, rigid adherence to pure scientific writing would leave unvoiced too many grave, easily observed problems simply because they have not yet been objectively studied or quantified. Many ignored crises deserve an academic study or an official investigation, but until those are conducted, events on the ground demand freedom from scholarly reticence. Second, exactly what constitutes proper science is unclear when the threats facing domesticated elephants are addressable only by an arsenal of collaborating sciences and humanities as diverse as wildlife biology, veterinary medicine, forestry, animal husbandry, law, sociology, history, and anthropology. To use each discipline’s jargon and technical vocabulary would produce an impenetrable babble of techno-speak, leaving the best voice an approach akin to science journalism
The need for simple, clear communication brings its own difficulties. The physicist Niels Bohr had a great fear of imprecise speech, often declaring that accuracy and clarity are mutually exclusive. Generalizing across eleven Asian countries, to be absolutely true at every point would require so many hedge words, provisos, and minor exceptions as to render text unreadable and simple ideas unfathomable. The author must occasionally have erred in the search for simple language and the broad picture. Similarly, in playing an interdisciplinary jack-of-all-trades, the author has undoubtedly introduced some errors which specialists would have avoided.
Beyond using press sources to an unusual extent for a work on management, this book frequently employs journalistic techniques. In some countries, such as Indonesia, the hard information is so scant, the challenges are so vast, and the variables so unique and unfamiliar that, as in journalism, the best to be hoped for is an evocative, broadly painted portrait. Another journalistic technique has been to vignette individual living elephants, partly to illustrate field conditions and partly to emphasize that the ultimate goal must be to physically help flesh-and-blood animals. The journalistic approach most unconventional in science writing is to vigorously tell both sides of a complex or contentious human issue and only then strive for an objective synthesis. No offence is intended to any country, institution, or person when telling the negative side of any story, and no judgements have been made. Every single scandal and horror story related herein is public knowledge taken from reputable published sources, usually a series of press reports written by nationals of the country. There are no revelations.
Apologies must be made for some quirky side trips - anecdotes and mini-essays most often decorously tucked away as footnotes - through the labyrinthine processes of traditional keeping. The hope is to give a hint of both the subtleties and the power of ancient skills and beliefs that are disappearing at a frightening pace. The author came to Asia twenty years ago hoping to be awed by a pristine world but instead becoming an unhappy witness to a relentless, irreversible erosion of the skills, the knowledge, and the ethos needed to properly care for elephants. Traditional elephant keeping in Asia is the high-tech of a bygone age, technology which in many Asian countries started to become sunset industries with the development that followed World War II. These many schools of sophisticated but obsolescent skills will nonetheless remain of critical importance for as long as humans keep elephants.
The intent of this book is not to propose answers, except for a few obvious first steps, but simply to table for discussion large and complex questions badly in need of investigation and thought. The hope is to supply a wide mix of specialists and thinkers with sufficient background that they might ponder how their own area of expertise could help elephants. Any meaningful answers will come only from many helping hands guided by a powerful combination of science and common sense.
Richard C. Lair
Bangkok
16 August 1997
