The Hindu : 'The elephant can never be fully domesticated'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 07, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Kerala

'The elephant can never be fully domesticated'

By Ignatius Pereira

KOLLAM Feb.6. The basic truth about elephants is that they can never be fully domesticated. The domesticated elephants always nurse a tendency to return to the wild and never return. Thus, they are wild though they appear tamed by obeying certain commands, according to Jacob V. Cheeran, a retired veterinary Professor,

A wrong notion is that a domesticated elephant would imperatively remain submissive and respond to the commands of the master as in the case of domestic animals such as the dog or the horse. Any breach by an elephant is regarded as an "unruly behavior that warrants suitable punishment''.

The elephant is genetically designed to be naturally wild even after domestication and expecting something contrary amounts to compelling it to achieve the impossible. A domesticated elephant may appear to be tame, but instinctive compulsions will inevitably drive it to exhibit its inherent wild side often passively and occasionally in a more violent manner.

`Musth' phenomenon

From the latter side, the most misconceived aspect is the `musth' phenomenon. The popular conclusion is that an elephant in `musth' is a rogue one which has to be subdued.

Such an attitude to an elephant in `musth' is "cruelty at its height and a criminal ignorance of understanding its natural side.''. The `musth' is a biological necessity in the bull elephant to ensure that the species is guaranteed from extinction. It is a stage when the level of the male sex hormones in a bull elephant's blood is very high with the specific intention of establishing dominance over other bulls. The phenomenon is seasonal and it never takes place at the same time of the year for all the bulls.

According to Dr. Cheeran and his contemporaries, K. Radhakrishnan and K. Chandrashekaran, `musth' is unavoidable in a bull elephant, vis-a-vis, the mating urge. Every male animal in the wild, right from the docile deer to the aggressive grizzly bear, exhibit this tendency during the mating season to ensure that its genes get translated into another generation.

The intention is to warn and ward off other male competitors for the female of the species in heat. For bull elephants, `musth' ensures a good degree of muscle power to combat, chasing away other bull elephants in the area and establishing the right and chance to mate with a receptive female. "Musth is a physiological phenomenon must for all healthy male adult elephants''.

Wild bull elephants in `musth' are seen to be less aggressive than the domesticated ones, as since the former get the chance for mating. Once the mating is over, the phenomenon subsides and it becomes normal. The same bull soon afterwards would succumb and run away from another bull in `musth', even lesser in age and inferior in size, which the former had chased away while in `musth'. That is how nature has designed things.

In the wild, things are different. According to the editor of the Kerala unit of the Journal of Indian Veterinary Association, T.P. Sethumadhavan, the male-female sex ratio in the wild stands at 1:90 respectively. Poaching for tusks has played an important role in the bull population going down and hence there is no dearth for a bull in finding a receptive partner.

In the case of domesticated ones, it is again only natural that the tusker targets its nearest contact, the mahout, "in an urge demanding a mate''. The communication gap results in casualties. Dr. Cheeran says "elephants have a remarkable memory power and turn emotional''. It can recall all the cruelties inflicted by the mahout and turn against him in frustration.

According to S.S. Bist, director of Project Elephant, there is a tendency to dismiss the domesticated elephants as another category of cattle and this could be the reason why domesticated elephants have not received due attention from conservationists despite the fact that are also classified under schedule-1 of the Wildlife Protection Act. In fact, under the Act, domestication has been permitted in the overall conservation interests of the species, he said.

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