Elephants - Highs and Lows

On Saturday (Independence Day) we decided to get away from the hullabaloo of Colombo and head for the hills, with Madeleine and her sister Angela and go to the Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage, about 2.5 hours away.

We didn't get off to a great start as all the streets were blocked for the Independence Day processions so after a series of frantic telephone calls with our driver for the day, Patrick we managed to rendezvous. The drive out of Colombo was bliss as everyone was enjoying the national holiday and having a lazy start to the day.

Pinnewala was founded about 25 years ago and started with 7 baby Indian elephants - all orphans. The endangered Indian elephant roams wild here (there are huge swathes of the country designated as nature reserves), but as is always the way man is steadily encroaching on their habitat with illegal logging and farming so the pressure is on. Sometimes these elephants are orphaned as they would be in the wild due to accidents or conflicts within their own herd, or shortages of food, sickness etc but in more recent times (the last 20 years) the reasons are more normally attributable to man-made (inflicted) disasters, such as land mines.

The herd, through breeding as well as additional orphans is now a massive 52 elephants, with one bull, several matriarchs (who boss everyone else around), and much to my delight about 8 "babies". This is an astonishing achievement as any zoo in the West will testify to - there are numerous obstacles to the propagation of elephants, not least the 22 month gestation period. It speaks volumes about the difference between this sort of programme which is based on protection in the elephants' natural habitat and captive breeding.

Unfortunately due to the length of the drive we missed bottle feeding time (can you imagine?), but instead were treated to the elephant bathing time in the river. The orphanage is located a gentle 400m stroll from a large river and twice a day, everyone saunters down for a paddle followed closely by about 500 gawping humans.

It really is hard to describe how wonderful these creatures are, how graceful (despite their size), how communicative (apparently they utilise a sonar communication system not dissimilar to dolphins and can keep in touch with each other over distances of several kilometres), how expressive their trunk movements are etc. And watching them en masse is a hoot! You have the jokers blowing water all over everyone else; the two babies circa 12 months (and although they look tiny by comparison to their mothers, they probably weigh in at about 150kg), wrestling with each other at length - this consists of manhandling each other into the deeper pools of water and then the victor sitting on top of the other for as long as possible - no one is in danger of drowning as they use their trunks like snorkels!; the young adults wrestling with their trunks; the greedy guts - standing as close to the awed crowds as their mahouts (handlers) will let them and gracefully extending their trunks step by step up the rocks, until surprise surprise someone passes down a piece of fruit or a cashew nut; and then the ever patient mothers, some with very small baby's (70kgs) sheltering under their legs and others, like the mum of the aforementioned 1 year olds obviously getting a little bit testy with all the fooling around!

In order to prevent a stampede, about 5 of the larger elephants have one foot attached on a large chain to a rock in different segments of the river, just so that the mahouts can control them if something scares them. The mahouts take great pleasure in washing them (which the elephants love) and also in showing them off to the tourists (for a small fee of course - c'mon it wouldn't be SL without a fee!). So yes of course I got sucked in and had to have an "up-close experience". For the grand price of 50 rps (about $2) I got to pat a baby. Their skin is really tough and rough so I gave him a bit of a scratch uncertain whether he'd be able to feel it. No problems there as he started leaning into me for more - very cute. And their trunks are incredibly tactile. It is quite astonishing watching and adult weighing 400kgs take a single cashew delicately out of your hand and just as delicately hand it down to their baby ....

As you can tell I was impressed! It was a great day and an honour to be able to get so close to these astonishing creatures.

Postscript: Opened the paper today - page 2 there is a photo of a farmer in front of the pregnant elephant he has shot and killed whilst protecting his crops ..............

Postscript 2: Today the paper tells of 3 elephants injured by landmines still waiting for veterinary assistance as they are in the LTTE (Tamil Tiger) controlled zone and the vets are too scared to travel there. No vets in the North and East (TT zone) of the country it seems .....