Day 338- From Here, From There... All Making A Difference!

I always love coming across articles about stopping the ivory trade from small newspapers!  These small, only discovered-by-some news stories make just as much of a difference as the huge, well known magazines and articles.  Good job, all!

Last night, in the gilded surroundings of the Attlee Room in the House of Lords, we hosted a gathering in aid of our Christmas campaign, which this year runs in conjunction with a wonderful charity called Space for Giants, which does extraordinary work in protecting elephants threatened by the ivory trade.

I should say that I have a particular fondness for elephants, having spent a little time with them in India, the country of my birth. For Hindus – even lapsed ones – Ganesha, with an elephant head, is the god of knowledge. These deeply intelligent mammals have come under constant attack in Africa. In 2011, more African elephants were killed than in any other year.

This newspaper shall be raising money to help combat that trade, and promote conservation in Africa. So there’ll be plenty of fascinating campaign coverage next week.

Another story that might make our front page is the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement on Thursday. Elsewhere in Fleet Street, headlines will reflect an emerging consensus about Britain’s economy – one that your newspaper won’t accept without a heavy dose of scepticism. That consensus suggests that Britain’s economy is recovering, and that the chances of a Tory victory at the next election rise in proportion with it. But here are four caveats.

First, while prices rise faster than wages, people get poorer. Second, the current optimism is driven partly by surging house prices in the South-east, which follow the cynical policy I call Help to Buy Votes. Third, despite all this apparent good news, Labour is still comfortably ahead in the polls. Finally, what is happening in Britain does little to address the historic economic changes affecting the middle classes caused by the rise of globalisation and new technology.

Things are rarely as they seem in politics. It’s our job to report them fairly, and analyse them for your benefit. This is a task that Patrick Cockburn excels at, and I want to end by giving him a public thanks.

This week, Patrick was named Foreign Commentator of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Awards, in recognition of his outstanding work in the Middle East. No serious student of that region has failed to incur a debt to him, and nobody who has met Patrick has failed to be inspired by the fortitude and erudition he has brought to journalism over decades. His interview with Moqtada al-Sadr this week was a case in point.

We are very lucky to count him as one of our own. Have a great weekend.

~Amol Rajan

November 30, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 337- Intelligent, Magnificent Animals

A short, sweet video of some female elephants helping a drowning calf...  Such intelligent, magnificent animals!

Go make a difference!

Day 336- Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everybody has a happy Thanksgiving!  

Go make a difference!

Day 335- I am Thankful

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for Amos Lekalau, Benjamin Kyalo, Edwin Lusichi, Hassan Adan, Julius Letoiya, Mishak Nzimbi, Joseph Sauni, Dr. Dominic Mijele, Felix Micheni, Dr. Jeremiah Poghon, Dr. Campaign Kiprotich Limo and Dr. Bernard Rono.

These people make up the rescue team and are the doctors at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.  They rescue wild orphans and bring them back to the Trust to nurse them back to health and ensure their safety throughout the elephants' and rhinos' lives.  

Who are you thankful for this year?

Go make a difference!

Day 334- "The Time to See- And Save- Africa's Elephants Is Now"

For safari travelers, few experiences are more moving than to be in the presence of elephants. One of Africa's most iconic species, they are highly intelligent and social. To watch a herd interact, especially with its youngsters, offers wonder and delight. And not many wildlife encounters can compare with a close-up view of an old elephant bull, whose giant tusks may grow to 10 feet long and weigh up to 100 pounds each.

Yet such opportunities are under severe threat as Africa's elephants face an unprecedented poaching siege. It's a crisis of global significance that the U.S. government is taking action against -- and one in which safari ecotourism plays an important role, undergirding the value for local communities of keeping elephants alive.

If Africa's elephants continue to be poached at today's rates, they could be wiped out in 10 years. That was the grim news delivered at last week's U.S. ivory crush at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Denver, Colo. On Nov. 14, federal officials placed a six-ton stockpile of confiscated illegal ivory into a massive rock crusher, pulverizing it to drive home the message that trade in illegal ivory will not be tolerated.

The tusks and trinkets, many carved in intricate designs worth millions on the black market, represent the deaths of approximately 2,000 African elephants, according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife officials. That is but a fraction of the elephants killed in the past year alone: some 35,000 have been slaughtered by poachers, at a rate of nearly 100 per day.

"This is a crucial moment in time. What we are seeing today with the decimation of these great wildlife populations is perhaps a harbinger of a world to come," said Daniel Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, at a reception preceding the ivory crush event.

But an alternate future is possible, Ashe said, if we choose to "take care to protect these animals and what they represent for our planet."

U.S. leadership is key in spearheading a global effort, he said, praising the executive order on wildlife trafficking that President Obama issued in July, and the decision to publicly crush the U.S. ivory stockpile.

Most of the demand for ivory comes from an increasingly affluent Asia, whose growing middle- and upper-class populations see ivory artwork as a status symbol. Skyrocketing ivory prices have made the illicit trade so lucrative that many poachers are willing to risk their lives for it. While the elephant poaching epidemic of the 1980s was largely local, regional and opportunistic, said Ashe, today it is a $10 billion enterprise dominated by large, organized criminal syndicates with ties to terrorist organizations, requiring a far greater and more collaborative response than ever before.

A vigorous and multi-pronged law enforcement effort is essential, said Robert Dreher, acting assistant U.S. attorney general, speaking at a media symposium prior to the crush event.

Yet to save the elephant, as well as other endangered species prized by poachers such as rhinos and tigers, it's essential that they be worth more alive than dead. And that will require a shift in values.

A crucial step is an education campaign aimed at Asian consumers, particularly the Chinese, who purchase approximately 90 percent of illegal African ivory. Grace Ge Gabriel, Asia regional director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told journalists that surveys indicate 70 percent of the Chinese public does not realize that ivory comes from dead elephants. Most presume that tusks fall out like teeth. Studies also indicate that the population most likely to buy ivory was only half as inclined to do so once they learned that elephants die in the process, said Ge Gabriel.

While shifting the values of ivory consumers is critical to reduce demand, wildlife-focused ecotourism can also play a role in fostering local efforts to protect elephants.

Kenyan wildlife conservation leader Paula Kahumbu said her country's economy is at stake, with 12 percent of revenues coming from tourism. Africans must recognize the value that their wildlife holds, both for economic purposes and intrinsically, said Kahumbu, who heads Kenya's Hands Off Our Elephants campaign with First Lady Margaret Kenyatta.

While Asian demand drives the market, Kahumbu said, Africans must rally to protect elephants, which have historically been revered as "part of our heritage, our identity. But that sense is being lost as Africans modernize," she said. We must restore pride among Africans, and leadership among African presidents."

"The front line is the communities who live with these magnificent animals," said Kahumbu. As long as local people are aiding in poaching elephants -- with often-meager financial reward compared to the high prices the criminal syndicates receive -- the situation is unlikely to change.

While the circumstances are grave for elephants, and the outlook may be grim for future safari-goers as rampant poaching decimates herds, elephants are still plentiful in places with adequate ranger patrols and law enforcement, and a classic African safari can still yield thrilling elephant encounters. Communities play a key role, too: when local people recognize the benefit of wildlife conservation through the economic advantages that ecotourism brings, they become partners in animal protection efforts.

If seeing elephants in the wild is a lifetime travel dream, there's no better time than now to travel to Africa. And in the meantime, learn more about efforts to protect Africa's threatened elephants.

~Wendy Worrall

Huff Post TRAVEL

November 26, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 333- How Long Can You Listen?

96 elephants are killed per day.  How can we make this stop?!

In 1980, roughly 1.2 million African elephants roamed the Earth. Last year, that number fell to a grim 420,000, largely due to poachers who ruthlessly mow down these majestic creatures for their tusks. According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, the ivory trade causes the deaths of approximately 35,000 African elephants every year. That's 96 elephants killed every single day.

To highlight just how horrific this mass murder is, the WCS has shared a haunting new video that challenges viewers to listen to the death cries of an elephant as it is chased and shot down by a poacher.

The video, part of the conservation group's anti-poaching "96 Elephants" campaign, asks the compelling question: How long can you bear to listen to this intelligent, emotive animal's expressions of pain?

"Few of today's poachers hunt elephants for subsistence," writes the WSC. "Most are commercially driven, heavily armed criminals. In fact, illegal poaching and wildlife trafficking is the fourth largest transnational crime. Ivory -- sometimes called 'the white gold of jihad' -- helps fund the military operations of notorious terrorist groups. Smuggling gangs move tons of tusks to markets thousands of miles away."

Poachers, the WSC adds, utilize sophisticated technology, including helicopters, GPS equipment, night-vision goggles and automatic weapons to track and attack elephants. They then "hack their tusks out with an axe," the group writes, "an atrocity often committed while the animal is still alive."

Activist Jackie Cittone Magid wrote in a recent blog post for the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust that elephants simply "don't stand a chance" against the brutality that they are confronted with every day.

"Greed and indifference has made us care more for material than living things," she wrote. "Today, an elephant is worth more dead than alive. What will we say to our children or grandchildren when there are no elephants left -- that we killed them so that we can own beautiful things?"

"These magnificent animals deserve better than this," she added. "They don’t have to have this ending. They deserve to be left in peace."

~Huff Post GREEN
11-21-2013

Go make a difference!

Day 332- Earth Without "ART" is just "EH" 3.0

Can you imagine a world without the artistic inspiration of elephants?

Go make a difference!

Day 331- Earth Without "ART" is just "EH" 2.0

Yesterday, with some friends, I made crayon art!  And of course, I did an elephant!  

If you would like to know how to make craft crayons into craftsmanship, send me an email, or respond to this post! (It's really easy and fun!)

Go make a difference!

Day 330- Part Five Of "Celebrity Elephants"

The Hard Life of Celebrity Elephants

To Venkitachalam, the solution to the harm inflicted on and by elephants is self-evident: their captivity should be banned — or at the very least, elephants should no longer be used in festivals. Tradition or not, they’re wild animals that belong in the forest. But Raman Sukumar, the founder of the Asian Nature Conservation Foundation and perhaps the world’s leading expert on Asian elephants, says it isn’t that simple. Asian elephants have been on the endangered-species list since 1986, yet contrary to trends nearly everywhere else in the world, the wild-elephant population in southern India has actually been increasing over the past several decades, with elephants now living in places where they hadn’t been spotted for hundreds of years. The trouble with this is that deforestation and booming human populations have shrunk and fragmented their habitats, which means elephants are increasingly coming into conflict with humans — raiding crops, running amok in forest villages. Thirty years ago, Sukumar told me, wild elephants killed around 150 people a year across India. Today it’s closer to 500. When wild elephants exceed the capacity of their habitats, the only alternative to capturing them is culling them, which is to say, shooting them dead.

What about continuing to allow elephant ownership but banning their use in festivals? “They’d probably be in a worse situation than they are now,” Sukumar said. Without festivals, their income disappears, and their owners might not be able to afford their care. And the festivals may have another benefit. “It’s important that people think that elephants are sacred,” he said. If people associate an elephant with Lord Ganesha, they’re much less likely to kill it if it ravages their crops or to poach it for ivory. The only two countries in the world where wild-elephant populations are rebounding, he noted, are India and Sri Lanka, both places where the elephant has a religious role.

Sukumar meant none of this as endorsement of the status quo. The current approach, he stressed, is unacceptable. There needs to be a large-scale educational campaign and a total overhaul of how captive elephants are captured, trained and cared for, he said.

Venkitachalam felt sure that such a program could never happen as long as Kumar was forest minister. And then, on April 1, Kumar wasn’t forest minister. In the end, he stepped down not because of Venkitachalam’s complaints or his father’s demands, but after his wife filed domestic-abuse charges against him (which he disputed).

Two weeks after Kumar resigned, the Forest Department put into effect a new set of festival rules, banning the parading of elephants throughout the hottest hours of the day and allowing no more than three elephants at a time within a temple’s walls. The next time I saw Venkitachalam, he smiled as if the revolution had come. There were still several weeks of festivals left, including Thrissur Pooram, the biggest elephant event of the year, and he was sure that these rules would make a big difference.

Four days after the rules became official, I went to a festival in Kadungalloor to watch as a veterinarian named Abraham Tharakan checked the elephants before they were paraded. There were 10 in all — 9 for the parade, plus 1 spare — and Tharakan gave them a perfunctory exam; he was mostly checking for signs of musth, a hormonal condition that sexually mature males go through for two or three months a year. Even the gentlest elephants are liable to become volatile and unpredictable during musth; if they’re in it, they’re forbidden to work. Tharakan told me that all these elephants checked out fine.

A few minutes later, we were in the temple’s office as he reviewed the elephants’ documents with a temple official. They must have forgotten that my translator was there, because Tharakan told the official that one of the elephants, named Pampady Rajan, was “not all that O.K.” — there was swelling around his temporal glands, he told them, which is one of the telltale symptoms of the onset of musth. But when I asked Tharakan again if he’d seen any problem, he insisted he hadn’t and denied that he’d said otherwise. Even as we spoke, Pampady Rajan was parading, despite the fact that there was a replacement elephant on hand. (He’s very tall, so they were probably reluctant to lose him.) And all nine elephants were lined up inside the temple walls, despite the new rule that allowed only three, and were crammed so close together that they were leaning into each other, despite another rule that requires that they be separated by at least five yards. An official from the Kerala Festival Coordination Committee was there, and I asked him why they hadn’t followed the new law. He seemed taken aback. “It’s a general recommendation,” he said. “Not a hard-and-fast rule.”

The next day was the day before Thrissur Pooram, and I stood on the vast parade grounds that make up the center of the city, where 300,000 people would gather to watch the biggest elephant pageant of the year. I was talking to an insurance agent and a former elephant owner named C. A. Menon about the elephant craze. “If you have a good car, a Cadillac, nobody cares,” he said. “But when an elephant goes to festivals, people say, ‘Who is the owner?’ ” Menon is both a proud festival promoter and a close ally of Venkitachalam. It’s an odd combination but really just reflects how many people in Kerala feel about the elephants: conflicted.

I asked Menon if the new rules would affect the Pooram. It was supposedly forbidden now to parade elephants between 11 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., when the tropical sun is most punishing, and Thrissur Pooram always uses elephants during those hours. He said that the government had stepped in to make a last-minute exception. “Next year also there will be complaints,” he said. “But then, too, they will say, ‘Only this year.’ And on like that.”

“So they’ll make an exception every year,” I said.

Menon let out a tremendous laugh. “Every year — like that,” he agreed. “How can you stop this spectacle?”

~Rollo Romig
New York Times

August 14, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 329- Intermission... Let's Protect!

So excited!  My "PROTECT" elephant shirt came today from Float Apparel!  Another great factor of this shirt series was that for every shirt sold, $8 was donated to David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust! In all, DSWT made over $27,000!  And remember, all of this money is going to the well being of the next generation of elephants! 

Go make a difference!

Day 328- Part Four Of "Celebrity Elephants"

The Hard Life of Celebrity Elephants

They’ve never met, these two men battling over the fate of Kerala’s elephants, and they couldn’t be more different: Venkitachalam in his faded dhotis and worn-out button-up shirts; Kumar with his entourage and flashy get-ups. Venkitachalam has seen only one movie in his life, and then only because they made him watch it at school; Kumar has acted in three movies in the past year alone, including a Malayalam-language remake of the Sandra Bullock film “The Proposal.” Their main difference, though, arises over a decade-old set of rules concerning the treatment of elephants. Late last year, Kumar rewrote it, removing, among other things, a 26-item list of acts of cruelty against elephants, like forcing a sick or injured elephant to march long distances or making elephants play games like tug of war or football.

When I asked Kumar about the revision, he said there were no drastic changes — he got rid of only “silly, silly things; small, small things, that’s all.” Raja Raja Varma, the head of the state’s Forest Force, agreed. “When there are too many rules, you can’t do justice to them all,” he said. And fewer rules could mean fewer opportunities for corruption. O. K. A. Thampi, the treasurer of a temple in Kuzhupilly, told me that he had just paid 50,000 rupees in bribes to make his temple’s festival happen. He wouldn’t say to whom: “I want to have a festival next year too.”

These costs are often passed on to the villagers. A man in Manimala told me that members of the local temple go door to door demanding donations for their elephant festival. “If you don’t have any cash on you, they say, ‘Oh, you have coconuts on your tree, we’ll take those,’ ” he said. In Thrissur, Venkitachalam said, the donations committees will stop public buses on the road and hit up all the passengers for cash.

None of this is to suggest that Kumar is personally corrupt. He’s been steadfast in standing up to the leader of his own party, a powerful political boss named R. Balakrishna Pillai, who spent a few months of 2011 in prison on corruption charges. Almost since the day Kumar took office as minister, Pillai has called for Kumar’s resignation for not following party orders. In a twist out of a Malayalam movie, Pillai also happens to be Kumar’s father.

The minister was sanguine when I asked about the family feud. Even if he were forced out of office, he said, he’d always have a home in movies. “If I resign from the ministry, I will be known as an ex-minister,” he said. “But there is no ex-artist. An artist is always.”

One evening in January, Vijaya Kumary brought her family to a festival in Rayamangalam featuring Thechikottukavu Ramachandran, the most celebrated elephant in Kerala and perhaps the tallest in all of India. Just before sunset, the colossal animal turned on the crowd. He broke Kumary’s arm, threw her daughter against a wall, stepped on her other daughter’s leg and trampled her mother to death, along with two other women in their 60s. Kumary was calm as she described to me the carnage of that night. It wasn’t until I asked why it had happened that she began to cry. “The people responsible are the temple authorities,” she said. “I’ve never seen so many elephants in the temple. It’s because of their greed.” At the end of the path that leads to her house stood a huge poster that no one had bothered to take away advertising the festival where her mother was killed, illustrated with a life-size photograph of Ramachandran. A speech bubble pointed from his mouth: “I’m coming.”

A few months after that night in Rayamangalam, I found Ramachandran chained on a concrete platform behind the temple that owns him. I watched him for an hour, and he never stopped swaying violently from side to side, lashing out with his trunk whenever someone lingered nearby. Rajan, his latest mahout, said that it was only a matter of time before he’d be hired out for festivals again. For now Rajan was keeping his distance — he’d been on the job for only 15 days. But soon he would teach Ramachandran to obey him. He’d probably start with a beating. “Otherwise he won’t listen,” Rajan said. “That is how you train an elephant, with beatings.” A previous mahout’s beating left Ramachandran blind in one eye.

~Rollo Romig
New York Times

August 14, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 327- Part Three Of "Celebrity Elephants"

The Hard Life of Celebrity Elephants

Until 1996, Venkitachalam hadn’t given much thought to the treatment of elephants. Then a student invited him to a 45-elephant temple festival, and he was shocked to see how badly an elephant was beaten for disobeying his mahout. The following year, an elephant ran amok near his house, and he watched a crowd make a chaotic attempt to restrain him. “This elephant had scores of wounds all over its body,” Venkitachalam said. After he submitted a complaint to the district collector about the elephant’s treatment, he said, the animal disappeared. On a tip from one of his students, Venkitachalam found him tethered to a cashew tree several miles away, his condition even worse. When he returned the next day, the elephant was dead.

A friend who worked as a human rights lawyer gave Venkitachalam a piece of advice: if no one speaks up, nothing will change. Soon his free time was consumed with filing complaints about elephant abuse. During festival season, he sends on average more than a dozen a day, to the anticorruption office of the Forest Department, to the Kerala High Court or directly to V. Gopinathan, the state’s chief wildlife warden. “His network is very good,” Gopinathan told me. “And his information is almost always correct.”

Venkitachalam told me that his organization has seven members, but he refused to let me talk to any of the others. “Their names are very secret,” he said. Some are deeply involved in temple activities, and they act as his spies on the ground, eavesdropping on the conversations of temple presidents, taking notes and photographs whenever an elephant is harmed or gets out of control. His sources include mahouts, temple priests who ride in elephant processions, local commuters and his own students. On big festival days, he stands under a banana plant in his garden while neighbors and strangers stop by to tell him what they’ve seen.

The day after a festival, Venkitachalam calls his sources to confirm any tips that seem to point to a violation. Then he writes up his complaint in longhand and passes it to one of his secret partners, who types it in an e-mail to the relevant authority. He avoids using computers himself, and he says he has never watched television, though he’s been on TV hundreds of times to denounce the abuse of elephants. Such devices, he says, might sap his creativity — and besides, 10 minutes spent watching television are 10 minutes he could be using writing complaints.

Among men who deal in the selling and trading of elephants, the mere mention of Venkitachalam’s name never fails to set off a rant. They say that he’s unreasonable and prone to exaggeration or that he must be taking money from some outside sources. His devotion protects him from the most obvious charge that would be leveled against any Muslim or Christian who took on the elephant business: that it’s an attack on religion. Instead, his critics write him off because of his lack of status. “There is always a tendency for people to suppress him,” P. S. Easa, a local elephant expert, told me. “If you look at him, with his dhoti. . . .” He waved dismissively at his shirt and pants and laughed. “He’s a simple man.”

For much of the last decade, the face of elephant ownership in Kerala has been K. B. Ganesh Kumar, a popular local movie actor, politician and president of a group called the Kerala Elephant Owners Federation. As an actor, Kumar made his name playing villains and rowdies. As a politician, he has represented his home district in Kerala’s Legislative Assembly for more than a decade. And as an elephant owner, he led the opposition to an appraisal of Indian elephants put out in 2010 by the central government, known as the Gajah report. Among its recommendations: All captive elephants should become government property; their use at public functions should be discontinued and their commercial employment phased out. To Venkitachalam, the document was like an elephant Magna Carta. From then on, his organization’s primary demand has been its implementation. For the elephant owners of Kerala, it was an outrage. Under Kumar’s leadership, they organized protests against the Gajah report and lobbied government officials to shelve it.

Then in 2011, less than a year after the report came out, Kumar received a remarkable appointment: he became the state’s forest minister, thereby making him the official most responsible for the enforcement of elephant-welfare law in Kerala, even as he continued to lead the Elephant Owners Federation. Venkitachalam, naturally, complained about this apparent conflict of interest. Kumar kept his elephant but was forced to resign from the federation. A bitter rivalry was born.

A week after I met Venkitachalam, I took a train to Kerala’s capital to meet Kumar in his ministerial office. His assistant had told me that I might have to wait: the minister’s schedule was hard to foretell. His aides waited with me, none of them busy, it seemed, with anything but drinking coffee. Four hours later, the minister finally swept into the room, and the aides leapt to their feet. Kumar has dark, curly hair, a macho mustache and a weakness for loud shirts; he was wearing a shiny purple number covered with paisleys. I was surprised at how soft-spoken he was. A half-dozen of his staff members sat opposite us, laughing whenever their boss cracked a joke.

When I asked him why there’s such a fondness for elephants in Kerala, a dreamy look fell over his eyes: it’s because they’re like the sea, he said, always moving and endlessly alluring. But when I mentioned Venkitachalam, his soft speech turned sharp. “This Venkitachalam, he never gave a banana to an elephant,” he said. “If you love an elephant, you can send a complaint, but first you should feed the elephant. This fellow hasn’t even fed one banana.” (In response, Venkitachalam told me that bananas aren’t a suitable food for an elephant — they might cause constipation.)

~New York Times

August 14, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 326- Part Two Of "Celebrity Elephants"

The Hard Life of Celebrity Elephants

The demand for elephants is skyrocketing just as the supply is plummeting. In 1982, India banned the capture of wild elephants except to protect the animal or its human neighbors, and it has been illegal to import captive elephants from other states since 2007. Despite their history in domestic situations, there’s no such thing as a domesticated elephant. Nearly every captive elephant in India was captured from the wild, and in Kerala, captive breeding is almost unheard-of, mostly because Keralites overwhelmingly prefer their elephants to be male (since they have tusks), which considerably shrinks their mating pool. When the Forest Department finished microchipping Kerala’s captive elephants in 2008, it said there were more than 700. Now the department estimates that there are fewer than 600, pressed into service at an ever-growing number of festivals.

Although Kerala’s captive elephants are controlled using force, their primary hardship isn’t the beatings. It’s how little their lives resemble what they were before they were captured. The typical wild elephant is a social, nomadic creature that bathes in rivers and spends much of its time eating as it walks. In Kerala, the typical captive elephant is a celibate male chained to one spot (sometimes for 24 hours at a time), bathed with a hose and isolated from other elephants except when working — a marginally better life than in a circus but harder than in many zoos, where the global trend is toward more-natural habitats. The animal that haunts me most is one I saw in the elephant yard at Kerala’s Guruvayur temple, one of the largest collections of captive elephants in the world. He was missing a tusk, and the remaining one had a deep groove worn into it, about a foot from the tip. Day after day he’d been using it to try to file away at his chains.

Back in Maradu, I found Mangalamkunnu Ayyappan tethered to a coconut palm in the yard of a small temple that was serving as the elephants’ greenroom. Sasi, the animal’s current first mahout, was resting under a peepal tree with a half-dozen of his colleagues. I asked him why Ayyappan killed the apprentices that night in Puthunagaram. “He definitely had some youthful mischief,” Sasi said. “This elephant does not like to be ordered about by others than its first mahout.” The current assistant mahout was there, too — a skinny 22-year-old named Hari Krishnan. Did the elephant’s history with apprentices make him nervous? “This elephant likes me a lot,” he said with a smile. Ayyappan flapped his ears nearby, restrained by two chains around his legs and one around his midriff, munching his way through a pile of caryota palm branches.

A temple official came over and said it was showtime, and the elephants and mahouts all walked down the road to the temple where the festival was happening, a two-and-a-half-acre complex complete with a field for fireworks and a long orange wedding hall. Before an audience of several dozen elephant fans, the mahouts dressed their elephants with gold-plated nettipattam on their foreheads, strings of bells around their necks and ankles and garlands of marigolds. A festival organizer told me that they rented Mangalamkunnu Ayyappan for a day rate of 65,000 rupees, more than $1,000. (Twenty years ago, that amount would have been enough to buy him outright.) The crowd grew steadily as four young men in bright white sarongs climbed each elephant and started making semaphore patterns with yak-fur brushes and peacock-feather fans. The riders’ confederates on the ground passed them a series of ever-more-colorful parasols, while 84 drummers and trumpeters raised a ruckus that sent some spectators into a kind of arm-waving trance. At some point after dark, while Mangalamkunnu Ayyappan walked the golden idol around the temple’s sanctum sanctorum, I made my own circuit around the perimeter, past rows of trinket-sellers and snack vendors who’d set up carts to cater to the festival crowd, and found that I was surrounded by tens of thousands of people.

The next day, in the nearby city of Thrissur, an anonymous informant who had been at the Maradu festival stopped by the home of V. K. Venkitachalam, an elephant-welfare advocate, to tell him what he’d seen. Venkitachalam gets a lot of impromptu visits like this: Keralites who care about elephants know him as the only person in the state who won’t stop talking about elephant torture. After confirming what the festivalgoer had told him with the Maradu Police, Venkitachalam filed a complaint with the state’s Forest Department claiming the illegal overwork of elephants and the explosion of dangerous fireworks in their vicinity. The animal-welfare laws on which his activism relies are some of the strictest in Asia. His challenge is persuading the government to enforce them.

I’d been trying to contact Venkitachalam for months, but I never got through to him until I arrived in India. “I got your e-mails,” he assured me when I showed up at his house. “I did not reply.” He is a wary man. “Many of these people say that they will kill me,” he said, referring to the organizers of elephant festivals. In 2008, he was walking across a temple parade ground when he was jumped by six thugs; he escaped, he said, only because a bus happened to stop nearby and he used the distraction to drop to the ground and roll away. To protect his secret network of informants, he never enters any contacts into his cellphone.

Venkitachalam is a handsome, deeply religious, 48-year-old bachelor with a neat salt-and-pepper beard, which he digs his fingers into as he talks. He invited me to sit on one of several old school desks in his front room, which normally hold the college students and professionals he tutors in math and accountancy 11 hours a day, 6 days a week. To the right of his bedroom, which he shares with his mother, was his prayer room. “As a Brahmin, I have to conduct three rituals a day,” he said. To the left was his library, a small room stacked to the ceiling with more than 10,000 newspapers dating to 1997. Some stacks had tabs sticking out of them reading “Fireworks Mishaps,” but most were labeled “Anaidayal”: elephant attacks.

~Rollo Romig
New York Times

August 14, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 325- Part One Of "Celebrity Elephants"

The Hard Life of Celebrity Elephants

One hot morning in Kerala, a tropical sliver of a state along the southwestern coast of India, I took a ride to Maradu, a town of nearly 45,000, to meet an elephant named Mangalamkunnu Ayyappan. He’s a leading-man type: darkly handsome, a bit of a rogue, the star of two feature films. During Kerala’s festival season, which nowadays stretches from December to May, he never gets a day off, parading in more than 200 festivals a year. As the tallest elephant among seven at Maradu’s annual function, he would be granted the honor of carrying a golden idol that evening.

Like any star, Ayyappan has groupies; his entry on the fan Web site Star Elephants commends his “clear honey colored eyes” and “majestic look.” But the fan sites don’t mention that in 1999, after a festival in Puthunagaram, he killed two assistant handlers, known as mahouts. It wasn’t an accident: he crept up on them as they slept on the roadside, picked them up with his trunk and trampled them to death. “Any other animal that had killed a person, they would have punished him by shooting him on sight,” says Sreekumar Arookutty, the director and writer of the popular Kerala TV series “E4 Elephant.” “But elephants get a special privilege in this society. An elephant has the right to kill one mahout, or two or three.” But why did Ayyappan do it? And why did he kill only the apprentices? “Only the elephant knows,” Arookutty says. “Maybe it’s because he wants to stop a new generation of mahouts from growing up.”

The captivity of elephants in south India goes back thousands of years. At first their use was mostly practical — tanks in wartime, timber forklifts in peacetime. In Kerala, elephants have been status symbols since the feudal era, and today most of its captive elephants are owned by private individuals. And it’s the only state in India where elephants are widely used for temple festivals. When or why this tradition started is unknown — no scripture commands it — but you can imagine how it may have happened: elephants were housed at temples between battles and were gradually integrated into religious festivities. Eventually, as soldiers and loggers replaced their elephants with machines, festivals became the best way owners could turn a profit on such high-maintenance animals.

Twenty years ago, Kerala elephants would appear only at whatever festivals were within walking distance, and few elephants were famous. Now they’re trucked all over the state to the highest bidder, the price driven up every year by the enthusiasms of the superfans who form associations to honor their favorite animals, urge festival organizers to feature them and trash-talk the competition. “You call that an elephant?” they write on their rivals’ Facebook pages. “Go tie him up in the cow barn.” The fans are especially concerned with what’s called lakshanam — a term that elephantspotlight.com defines as “the sexy features of the elephants.” A fan named Sujith told me: “The ivory should be clean white. The tail should be like a brush, and the trunk should reach the ground.” (Sujith’s own favorite elephant, he said, was out of commission this season: he was hit in the hind legs by an S.U.V.)

Although most elephant festivals in India are Hindu, Kerala is unusual in that its population is a quarter Muslim and a fifth Christian, and those faiths have jumped on the elephant bandwagon, too. At a Muslim festival I went to, rowdy young men rode up and down the road throwing confetti from the 60-odd elephants they rented — some of the same elephants that carried idols at Hindu temples the day before.

~Rollo Romig
New York Times

August 14, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 324- The Elephant "Nose"!

This Elephant 'Nose' There's A Crocodile Lurking Below 

The image was captured by photographer Ian Salisbury, who manages a safari lodge nearby.

"One of our guests had seen a crocodile try a similar attack on another elephant earlier in the day so, camera in hand, I went to see if there might be a repeat performance," Salisbury told Caters News Agency. "The action was so quick – a couple of seconds – and fortunately I had the camera pointing in the right direction. Having spent 30 years in the African bush, I [realize] how lucky I was to catch the scene."

The elephant dismissed the crocodile, who'd clearly bit off more than he could chew, with a quick shake of his trunk. Neither animal appears to have been seriously injured in the incident.

Crocodiles aside, African elephants face a variety of threats in the wild, particularly from poachers in search of ivory and meat. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies African elephants as "vulnerable." In 2012 alone, as many as 35,000 elephants may have been killed for their ivory.

~Huff Post GREEN

November 11, 2013

Go make a difference!

Day 323- $8 - $10 Billion

"Profits from wildlife trafficking, estimated at $8 to $10 billion per year, fund other illicit activities such as narcotics, arms and human trafficking."

~Secretary of State John Kerry

Go make a difference!

~SenatorofStateJohnKerry
Re

~~~~~~

d more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/13/208511/us-offers-1-million-reward-for.html#storylink=cpy

Day 322- It's Crushed!

This is the perfect article!  Yes, the six tons of ivory was crushed today in Colorado!  Here's a great idea- take the crushed ivory and make it into a mandala!  Laurel Neme came up with this idea in a National Geographic "A Voice For Elephants" article, and I think it would be a fantastic way to honor the thousands of elephants that have mercilessly died for human greed.  You can read more below!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tomorrow the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will use an industrial rock crusher to destroy its six-ton stockpile of confiscated elephant ivory. The event is both a demonstration of the U.S.’s commitment to stop ivory trafficking and its belief that the legal ivory trade stimulates consumer demand and promotes elephant poaching.

What it is not is a memorial to the elephants that died and a return of their ivory remains to the earth from which they came.

In the following weeks, there will be much discussion about what to do with the crushed ivory. Nothing has yet been decided.

I propose using the ivory dust to create a mandala. Mandalas are sacred sand paintings found in many traditions, including those of Buddhists, Hindus, and the Navajo. These intricate designs represent wholeness and interconnectedness and are made by meticulously placing millions of grains of colored sand on a flat surface or platform. Typically the process takes days or weeks.

When the paintings are finished, they are deconstructed, often by sweeping the sand into the wind or water.

In many ways, this is akin to the scattering of ashes after a funeral. To me, this would be a creative and respectful end for the elephant ivory.

While the deconstruction serves as a metaphor for the impermanence of life, it is also meant to bring healing. Each grain of sand carries a healing blessing that then spreads throughout the world.

Both aspects of the mandala—the process of its creation and the process of letting it go—symbolize how we are connected and are supposed to provide comfort, peace, and wisdom.

Mandalas are also believed to generate positive energy and help transform ordinary minds into enlightened ones. That’s what is urgently needed to stop ivory trafficking and the poaching crisis.

In reflecting on the upcoming crush, I only hope that whatever is done with the remains will stand as a fitting memorial to the victims of ivory trafficking and perhaps go some way toward encouraging people to help those elephants still living.

Let us take our cue from the elephants themselves. They teach us (in the words of Kenyan conservationist Daphne Sheldrick) to “focus on the living, rather than the dead, knowing that the dead are beyond any more suffering and pain, and that one has, at least, afforded them a comfortable end surrounded by compassion and love.

Let us honor the elephants fully by banning the trade and refusing to buy ivory.

~Laurel Neme

National Geographic

November 13, 2013

Go make a difference!