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

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