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Elephant Tails

Flirting with charming two-ton beauties and playing with jumbo babies, our Elephant Guru's blog introduces our colourful cast of gentle giants.

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A little trouble in big China? (Our closest wild elephants)

By John Roberts 8 May 2008 02:16:00

I feel a trip coming on, my feet are itching, there's something happening close by that I think I should know more about - yes, there's a tonne of work to be done in camp and around the hotel but I'm also finding time to search through all my old newswire pieces - things that caught my eye back in the whirlwind of high season and filed in the recesses of my C:/ drive under look-at-later.

    Wild Chinese elephants?  To tell the truth I've known of both the herds covered below (I believe there are two separate populations) for a while and have been looking to get up there.

    The first one covered in the piece below is perhaps the most intriguing because I am physically watching the wet season mist bubble over the top and run lava like into the Mekong of the far South Western corner of their potential (OK - highly theoretical but indulge me) range as I type.

    They find themselves, as it says in the piece, shared with Laos and basically still wild in the Bokeo, Nam Ha, Nam Fa reserves and a forgotten little back-water of China in what is now the real romantic Golden Triangle: where Laos, Burma and the Dai (or Shan in English, Thai Yai in Thai) autonomous region meet; between the ex-Shan state of Xishuanbanna (Sipsong Pan Na - 12,000 rice fields in Thai - given to the Chinese by the British to keep French hands off it back in the day) and the Laos city state town of Muang Sing - where the colonial mapping expeditions met and had what must have a decidedly prickly black tie dinner.

    The second population - which I also want to visit but not quite with the same passion - where I believe the publicised 'attacks' occurred are in the famous Elephant Valley north of the city of Jing Hong (Chiang Rung in Thai) where wild elephants and the tour buses of mass Chinese tourism (up in Jing Hong you can buy "Welcome to Thailand" and my, even poorer than today, 2004 Thai was good for communication) allegedly meet.  

    The elephants are still wild but apparently sightings can be more or less guaranteed for hundreds of people a day; I'm interested to see how it is handled and just how wild they really are - doesn't sound like my cup of tea but if it raises money to keep wild elephants in the wild, who am I to argue?
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Protecting China's last elephant herd

In addition to sharing a border - and the Mekong River - with Laos, Yunnan province also shares China's last herd of Asian elephants, which in recent years has dwindled to only 400 elephants. The herd lives in nature reserves near the border between China and Laos.

This week the Yunnan Provincial Forestry Department met with their counterparts from Laos in Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture to discuss ways to protect the endangered Asian elephant, which falls under China's grade-one protection for endangered animal species.

The representatives from China and Laos reached four major agreements:

1. To educate villagers about how to protect elephants
2. To tighten hunting gun controls
3. To draft a plan for cross-border elephant protection and apply for international funds, and
4. To plan next year's annual meeting in Laos

There are roughly 30,000 Asian elephants left in South and Southeast Asia. Asian elephants average 3.2 meters in height and more than five tons. The animals spend most of their days looking for food, understandable considering that they require around 300 kilograms of it each day.

Although it is less populated than other parts of China, Xishuangbanna is still feeling the impact of China's rapid economic development. Elephants, normally docile creatures, are known to attack when feeling encroached upon by humans. In the last few weeks, there have been two elephant attacks upon humans in Xishuangbanna.

In January, American tourist Jeremy Allen McGill was seriously injured by an elephant attack which left him with eight broken bones and injuries to his lungs, stomach and intestines. Weeks later another elephant attack ended in fatality when on the night of Chinese New Year an elephant in Xishuangbanna attacked and killed Zeng Shaoping as he returned from holiday festivities.

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