It is important to have family (on the new Elephant Family strategic action plan)

By John Roberts
29 August 2010 02:13:00

Have you ever been in a relationship where folks outside can't understand why you're friends & hang out together?  You just know you like each other and are happy to support each other despite what others think?

No? well, perhaps it's just me then.

I have to admit that our relationship with the English Charity Elephant Family is a bit like that though.

In the early days when we were starting up a prominent Thai conservationist asked me outright, why are E.F. supporting you?  Surely you have enough money coming in being who you are & how you're funded? - I'm sure they asked E.F. the same thing.

The truth is that the relationship, like all good ones, other than two elephants they bought and look after (before, as it happens, we both learned better than to buy an elephant) isn't financial, I like to think we support each other because we have common goals & see a little of one another in the other's organisation - for instance, we both learned from the buying of Lynchee & Poon Larb (well the real learning issue was Tawan - but we shared info) that buying an elephant under those circumatances almost always puts another elephant in danger, at best, of early separation & at worst of wild capture.
In fact, they learned more & quicker than we did (not surprising given dull old me sits at the management peak of our little Foundation).  They decided, on the best possible advice and after a lot of soul searching, to get out of the welfare business altogether and to concentrate on saving wild elephants.

I am on record as saying, so may as well repeat it (& you all know I like to repeat myself), that the work with wild elephants is where the true species conservation is going on, those guys out there in the field are the ones saving the species from extinction.  A pure welfare organisation may be making elephants and mahouts more comfortable for this & succeeding generations but, for the most part, lofty claims of saving the species should not be made.

Despite concentrating their meagre resources (& let's face it, in the face of this, all resources are meagre) on wild elephants and being Gentlemen & Ladies of their word they agreed to honour their agreement to look after Lynchee for us (& those that know about Lynchee & I know how grateful we are for that).

So, having answered the prickly question of why we continue to be on their website, we come to another one, asked in our very own corridors of power.  If we're an organisation that deals with domestic elephant welfare, why do we support an organisation that only talks about wild elephants?  This question revolves around Elephant Family's very successful awareness raising campaign in London, the elephant parade.  Through a slightly convoluted route (& unbeknown to me) a proposal to sponsor a life sized elephant called Little Bird, who was to live in a strategic place during the glorious London summer, turned up on the 118th Floor of Anantara/Four Seasons Towers, addressed "To the Head Honcho".  It took awhile to flutter down to me in my office-above-the-ele-camp but being elephant related, flutter down to me it did - managing to pick up some speed along the way as it was wrapped around the usual brick.

There was a note attached, "Should we support?".  I took it that those in charge of getting the Anantara name (important to note this wasn't a chance to support in the name of the Foundation it was in the name of the hotel) had already looked at it & decided in the positive (they live in the stairwell between 75th & 76th floors of Anantara towers & so stuff gets to them first) so I took the question to be: "Is it good for elephants for us to support?", more importantly, my dilemma was, "Would it be better for elephants if I recommended that those in high places sign the money across to the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation instead?".

Well, we need cash, we've currently 17 (18 if you count Cherry, errr... 74 if you count all the adult humans) hungry mouths to feed and the situation is such that we're not exactly lighting our cigars with twenty quid bank notes so, for an easier life, the thought briefly flitted across my mind, stopped, asked for directions & was shown the left ear from which to jump.

We're about helping elephants that can't help themselves, we have found a way, we think, to do that for those under our control but those never were the all the elephants we set out to help (& we actually have 'find ways to help wild elephants' or something like that written into our charter), so the answer was yes, good cause, let's do it! 

Anantara took little bird under her wing & she eventually went on to raise in excess of £10,000 for the Family at auction and the whole parade in excess of £4M to help wild elephants (as well as, of course, a great deal of public awareness that the big grey ones you see on the BBC in Africa actually have more petite, prettier cousins across the way that are fewer in numbers & facing similar problems).
Several months down the line a heavy document slips into my inbox from the across the water, EF have dotted the t's & crossed the i's on their strategic action plan.  I open it with some trepidation, I must admit, having advised the Head Honcho to put our weight behind the newly re-navigated Family it is of some importance to agree with the course that they have chosen.

So, it turns out, far from forgetting the domestic arm of the species, they have summed up their position in three simple actions in what they term their 'Survival Charter for the Asian Elephant':
 

1, To compile a register of the ownership of all captive elephants

Couldn't agree more, indeed, would go further (because, theoretically, in Thailand all domestic elephants are already registered), not only is it necessary to compile a publicly accessible register of all captive elephants, the law itself must be strictly enough enforced & free enough of loopholes that it cannot be bypassed and that smuggling & wild capture of elephants becomes pointless as they become impossible to bring onto the market.  Later in the month we hope to host an international panel discussion with, amongst other luminaries, Dr Sumolya Kanchanapangka who has done ground breaking work in this field & is making recommendations to the Thai Government.
 

2, To ensure that all registered owners of captive elephants provide high standards of veterinary care and welfare through an annual inspection of their animals.

This is slightly trickier, not the annual inspection bit, I would love to see an annual inspection by the livestock department vet.s written into any new law, at least, to make it workable, for any commercial enterprise involving elephants.  It happens to a certain extent thanks to the Elephant Alliance of Thailand which annually brings vets to Northern camps, though this is voluntary on the part of the camps.  A new law ensuring minimum body condition index and maximum working age could be enforceable with the registration laws.

Welfare is the tricky bit as there is such a wide ranging definition of what constitutes welfare so we would first have to come to a legal definition as to what constitutes a well off elephant, for this reason, when it comes to a law I'd focus on the health issues rather than an often nebulous idea of welfare.  There is work afoot, again by Dr Sumolya's industrious department, to define welfare in scientific terms using blood chemicals but I think this is some way off.
 

3, To cease the practice of wild capture to replace captive animals that is a drain on wild populations.

OK, regular readers can stop reading now & fast forward to the lovely video at the bottom, you know what I'm going to say, don't you?

For those of you new to this 'ere blog, this is one of my soapbox issues and one I agree with so strongly there are those out there who may suspect that I wrote this (or, at the very least, am making it up) but I didn't &, though they did ask for my thoughts before drawing up the Charter, I don't think this was my doing but that of the more learned proper scientists also consulted.  

As wild capture is illegal and bringing elephants across borders without very good reasons is contrary to the tenet of CITES a good, well enforced, registration law should put a stop to this practice in Thailand (& stop the Thai market from driving it in our neighbouring countries) but until such times as there is a loophole free law in place we must realise that, as outsiders, not part of the traditional elephant owning communities, to buy an elephant for any purpose (be it to 'rescue' or to use in a trekking camp) is to drive a market that is very likely supplied by wild capture.

There are circumstances where this doesn't happen of course, mahouts do retire, camp owners give up on the business & get out, (go spend time in the Casino or try to run a hotel as a more comfortable way to lose money), but we have found over the years that a mahout with money in his pocket & without an elephant, in the vast majority of cases, buys another elephant and continues with whatever the work he was doing with it.  By definition, abusers continue to abuse their new elephant and lovers continue to love, street walkers walk the streets and trekkers try to scrape a living by letting their elephant walk around in circles for ten hours a day.

The cheapest source of new elephants (except breeding them yourself, for which you need at least a mother elephant, a stud fee & an eighteen to twenty two month patience + at least one year - of course ideally three but who has that sort of patience? - growing time) seems, suspiciously, to be along the border areas & we know from the latest Traffic report that smuggling takes place, we also know from reliable sources that wild capture takes place in our neighbouring countries.  I'll leave you to join the dots.

Old hands can tune back in now because here's a cool video from Elephant Family: if you haven't already, don't forget to sign the petition once you've finished watching the video.

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