The Hard Life of Celebrity Elephants

Reading this article just tore at my heart. Being human is vastly overrated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/the-life-of-celebrity-elephants-in-india.html?pagewanted=2&hp

The Hard Life of Celebrity Elephants
By ROLLO ROMIG
Published: August 14, 2013

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.

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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.

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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....

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