Electric Eleland (are you experienced?)

By John Roberts
2 November 2009 09:54:00

It is a peculiarity of life, I've found, that no matter when you start a project - if it is a project worth starting - it will be finished at exactly the moment that you no longer need to use it: the baby elephant camp was finished at the beginning of last dry season, the office roof was finally fixed on the day the rains stopped, the solar showers for the mahouts were finally installed just as the idea of hot water made everyone sweatier and smellier, I have no doubts that my elephant dung solid fuel machines will finally see the light of day at about the same time this year - but that's the wonderful thing about being weather obsessed, seasons always, always, always come around again (well, they used to anyway).

So it is with the much touted electric fence for our babies, the Mark III is ready to be launched on an unsuspecting ele public at just the time the fish are gasping for air and finding ready friends in the egrets' beaks down on the grassland.

Luckily we always have half an eye on the bigger picture, the Mark III in this case, was never really designed just for our little valley - yes it will give a few eles a chance to run around, cause chaos and create unwanted wallows when our grassland floods again, as it surely will; but the plan has always been to finalise a design on this relatively small scale that could be extended around a larger plot of land, wherever, whenever, whoever this becomes possible.

As with all these things, the electric fence idea is, of course, not ours but the designs we borrowed from downloaded internet photos, mobile phone sneaky spy shots and our visit to Her Majesty's Royal Re-introduction Project didn't seem to fit our rambunctious but obviously fairly tame young 'uns - so Mark's I & II fell by the wayside in a pile of not even barely worried buffalo (signal too weak - wire too thick) and St Vitus' dancing mahouts (hmmm.... bit too strong that one - you didn't think we'd actually test it on eles did you?).

Once we had the jolt level to our satisfaction Lynchee and I went in, I with bated breath - how would she react? would the first jolt send her panicking through the fence the other side? would she hate me forever? - she with glorious ignorance - mmmm... green grass to eat; tyres, people to play with.

Unfortunately I was actually so concerned (once more my scientific credentials go flying out the window) that I needed to be there to help her cope with the consequences of the first shock that I don't have a video or photo of the momentous occasion when she backed up a couple of inches, made no noise at all and came to the conclusion not to touch the blue rope again before going on with the grazing and the playing.  In short the electric fence worked just as it should - other eles were not quite so quick to realise (but then I'm biased as to the brightness of our Lynch') but they got it in the end.



...after a quick (but largely unnecessary) verbal lesson in how to use it...



...it is down to some serious playing.

The trick now will be persuading the mahouts to let their eles use it, unlike classic cattle and horse herding countries the electric fence is not a common method of stock control here in Thailand and we do make a point of listening to our mahouts' concerns - they started with 'the elephant will surely die it is lethal, you're completely crazy' which is an easy one to disprove having built and demonstrated the thing whilst maintaining a couple of very much alive eles - now we're on a slightly trickier belief that their babies will be sent sterile.

Hey, ho, another day, another challenge in our mahout friendly, rescue rental world.

But we have a long time to win them around because, as alluded to at the very beginning of the missive, the project is finished just at the time we don't really need it - the grassland's dry and the babies are daily out running around in the tall grass with perhaps, just perhaps, a little splashing thrown in.

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