Malaysia

There are fewer than 20 domesticated elephants in Malaysia, about eight working as khoonkies and the rest in zoos {Daim, 1996}. Three young calves are kept at the Elephant Management Unit’s field station according to G.S. Child (Pers. comm., 1997). In 1974 Malaysia’s Department of Wildlife and National Parks began its elephant translocation program run by the especially established Elephant Management Unit. Translocations are the sole goal of the unit. Elephants are nowhere employed at logging or any other paying work, and there has never been any attempt to breed. (Given that all Malyasia’s khoonkies are males, breeding would require the permanent retention of captured wild cows.) As of early 1996 the forest department had captured and translocated 392 wild elephants, as described by Khan et al. (1992) and by Abdullah et al. (1992). Three wild elephants have been radio-collared for satellite tracking and then released, as described by Jasmi and Othman (1996) and by Jasmi and Stüwe (1996).

In 1974 four khoonkie elephants, all males of 20-25 years, were imported from Assam along with their mahouts; four more khoonkies have since been trained from amongst the captured elephants. Jasmi and Othman (1996), say, “The Meleseka [mela-shikar] was tried in this thick tropical rain forest of Jengka but was found to be ineffective as only two young female elephants were captured.” The Elephant Management Unit soon resorted to drug immobilization, using Immobilon (M99). The darting is always done by a man on foot, and the khoonkies have never been used as a shooting platform. Some Malaysian men have been trained as mahouts by two mahouts specially brought in from Thailand.

Drug immobilization has reduced the hunter elephants to being nursemaids, albeit irreplaceable nursemaids when it comes to leading an already drugged and restrained wild elephant out of the forest onto a waiting truck. In an otherwise excellent overview of over twenty decades of catching and translocating wild elephants, Daim (1995) writes only one sentence mentioning the wildlife department’s khoonkies: “Two trained working elephants are used to guide the captured elephant to the loading bay [of a truck].” Such scant mention suggests just how easy the khoonkie’s job has become. Neither the elephants nor their mahouts need to be as fit or as skilled as when the only method was to run down and noose adrenaline-driven, running wild elephants.

Malaysia is now looking for four more khoonkies, two teams of two {Stüwe}. Malaysia’s success with khoonkies is quite amazing considering that a nearby country with an elephant-keeping tradition over 2,000 years old, Sri Lanka, has had to resort to bulldozers because of a lack of khoonkies.

In a conservation plan for wild elephants in Sabah, Sale (1996) recommends several measures be tested for use in the control of problem elephants. Along with the testing of scare devices, translocations, and trophy hunting licenses issued for adult males, Sale suggests the possibility of the “capture and domestication of persistent offenders and their use in tourism.”