Elephantine Quest

Elephants are very intelligent animals. They have shown very good problem solving skills. However, Elephants have very poor vision. Their small eyes can only see 30 to 60 feet. They make up for their poor sight with keen sense of hearing and smell. An Elephant’s large ears amplify sounds, letting it hear sounds that other animals cannot. Its sense of smell is thought to be superior to any other land animal. It also has a very good sense of touch. For such a large animal, the Elephant is very deft, having the ability to balance on two legs if necessary to reach leaves in a tree. It also shows incredible balance when lifting large objects. Its sense of taste is much like that of other higher animals. It is able to tell the difference between food that tastes good and food that tastes bad, as well as food that tastes preferable.

Because Elephants require much larger areas of natural range than many other terrestrial mammals they are often the first species to suffer the consequences of habitat fragmentation and destruction. Elephants are also considered a pest in areas of agriculture, especially populations surrounded by cultivated land; crop raiding is frequent and there are often human deaths. Ivory poaching does not threaten the Asian Elephants as much as it does the African Elephant. Only Indian males carry tusks.

Project Elephant was initiated in 1991 as the “Indian National Elephant Conservation & Management strategy”. A task force has created a long term conservation program for the Elephant in India under a specially funded initiative based on the ecological approach of Project Tiger. The objectives are to insure the long term survival of identified larger populations and to evolve management plans for the smaller populations, involving reduction of Elephant-human confrontations. Within Elephant reserves, among other aims, the project intends to link fragmented habitats by establishing corridors (now initiated in Uttar Pradesh), and protect corridors currently under threat; and also attend to the socio-economic problems that may be associated with Elephant conservation action.

The Elephant is a slow-growing species: the gestation period is between 19 to 21 months. Given the best living conditions, it has been estimated that the interval between two calving is about four years. On the other hand, it is a long living animal. And they can go on calving till the age of 60 or more. The longevity of the Elephant in the wild is largely a matter of conjecture. The average life expectancy of a healthy animal is assumed to be around 70 to 80 years. The long reproductive period of the female of the species is a cushion against temporary setbacks suffered by a population due to natural calamities like extreme drought conditions (not a common happening in those Indian forests where the Elephant now survives), or epidemic diseases like anthrax. The long life expectancy combined with the fact that Elephants are extremely adaptable in their preference of habitat – they thrive in all kinds of tropical forests except in dry scrub land and desert (which do not put off the African Elephant), and salt-water mangrove, helps to explain why it has managed to survive in sizeable numbers despite a massive destruction of habitat.

The Elephant’s is a matriarchal society. The leader of a group is a female, usually the oldest, the largest and the wisest of the lot. This is also called the family group which consists of a nucleus of two or three mature cows, sub-adult animals still moving with their mothers and calves. The basic unit consists of a cow with its unweaned calf. The size of such a family group can vary from three to ten or more in number. Sometimes, in some particular season, especially when Elephants are on march, moving from one area of the forest to another, several family groups come together to form what can be termed a “herd”. They usually split up into smaller units once they settle down in any particular are for foraging.

There is enough evidence to suggest that, historically, the Elephant had a very wide distribution in India. During the Indus Valley Civilization (3rd to 2nd Millennium B.C.)when, as available evidence suggests, the western part of the sub-continent had not yet been desertified, Elephants were probably ubiquitous all over the land, barring the higher reaches of the Himalayan and the coastal salt-water mangrove swamps. Even in the Himalayas, the evidence of casual visits by the Elephants has been noticed at a height of 10,500 feet (3200 meters) in recent times.

Today, the Asian Elephant is considered an endangered species. The distribution of wild Elephants in India is limited to four widely separate geographical zones : South India (Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu; very recently a small group has found its way into Andhra Pradesh, much to the amazement and understandable consternation of the local people who had never seen a wild Elephant before) ; Central India (Orissa, Bihar and the adjoining southern part of West Bengal) ; North India (in Sub-Himalayan tracts of Uttar Pradesh) ; and the North-East of India ( in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, tripura and the Northern part of West Bengal ; a few come into Manipur from Myanmar seasonally).

Towards the end of December, 1993, a herd of about 45 Elephants with calves were retreating along the Delhi Road, through crop fields to the township of Hooghly in West Bengal. The Elephants who had strayed for the first time into Hooghly were proceeding back towards their usual movement in Bankura District. The march towards the city of Calcutta was checked by the relentless efforts of the Forest Department personnel, police and local villagers.

It was a peculiar war between man and Elephant. The south-westward movement was resisted by a small contingent of staff from the Wildlife Wing. What was peculiar in that movement was that the herd left behind two calves, which could not keep pace with adult members as their energy flagged because of the continuous chasing for the past few days. What was more amazing was that the two abandoned calves were not taken back by the herd. In a last ditch effort to reunite the calves with the herd, they were thoroughly smeared with fresh dung so that they could assume a new smell – identity and thus be accepted by the herd. But the Elephants were not to be fooled. Only a huge smelt them, rested its trunk for sometime on one of the calves and moved slowly to allow the calves to keep pace. But the calves weakened and could not keep pace with the herd and was finally left alone. Unfortunately, one of the calves dies after a month of Calcium deficiency.

Maneka Gandhi, the former Indian Minister of Social Justice & Empowerment and an avid Wildlife Conservationist warned that India’s Elephant population is on the brink of extinction. According to Her – “Elephants are almost extinct in India. I say this with great responsibility because we have less than 20,000 Elephants”.

Maneka Gandhi went on to explain that much of the blame for the Elephant decline is due to rampant poaching and brutal training methods. She stated that because only the male Elephants produce large tusks, poachers target them more often. She went on to say that – “there are less than 800 tuskers left in India which means the semen distribution is low – and they are being killed at the same time”. Dr. Iqbal Malik, a leading animals rights activist, said that India is losing 10 percent of its tusker population every year to Ivory poachers.

Leaving poaching aside, it is equally true that some parts of Forest India have excessive Tourism. The Tourism Department with the help of the Forest Department requires to implement policies that govern Tourism, govern the revenue that Tourism generates and make sure that some of this revenue goes back to the National Parks.

It is hoped that antiquated old rules will be abolished with new and restructured ones for the survival of Indian Elephant which is on the verge of extinction.