The Divinity Nobody Wants
by John Tidwell
The great white elephant was sick, and King Thibaw, the last god-king of Burma (1875-1885) was in a panic. White elephants had been sacred throughout Asia for centuries as symbols of a king's might and the favor of the gods. So he loaded his favorite palace elephant with treasure: Sprays of diamonds to ward off evil spirits hung from its forehead, huge jewels were set into each tusk, golden pendants dangled from its ears, and about its neck a gold plaque was inscribed with the beast's royal titles. At all times the elephant was shaded with a jeweled umbrella and a huge mirror reflected its splendor. Yet only a mile away in the thick forest that surrounded the palace, elephants of ordinary hue labored through the mud under the whip, pulling enormous teak logs to build more glories for the king.
For 5,000 years, Asian elephants have had a complex relationship with humans, and still are cast in the contradictory role of being both exalted and exploited, rare and unwanted. As the number of Asia's elephants dwindles and their once mighty forests shrink into tiny green islands, the issue of where elephants truly belong in a human-dominated world arises with greater urgency than ever before. Once Asian elephants numbering in the millions ranged from Babylon to southern China, in as many as three different species. When human civilization developed in Asia, elephants were an integral part of its flowering. Elephants' great strength was used to build cities and defend ancient empires from Siam to Rome. The Hindu pantheon of gods included Ayravana, the war elephant of the god Indra, and Ganesha, the elephant-headed son of Shiva who brought prosperity and wisdom to his devotees.
Today, as the great forests of Asia are cleared and leveled for agriculture and the timber industry, its elephants are rapidly vanishing. In 1900 there were some 100,000 wild elephants throughout India, mainland Southeast Asia, and the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Now that number has been reduced by half. As the jungles recede, elephants have less and less habitat to live and feed in, and when villages spring up along ancient elephant migration routes, elephants often clash with humans. Conflict also erupts when hungry elephants encounter lush plantations of their favorite foods: bananas and sugar cane. Entire harvests can be destroyed in a single night, and for many impoverished villagers their entire livelihood as well.
Today the most dramatic example of this has occurred on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where less than a thousand wild elephants now live in a handful of small rainforest reserves in central Riau province. The reserves are surrounded by enormous palm plantations, which produce oil that is used in everything from kitchen soap to industrial plastics. Local subsistence farmers also regularly hunt or plant crops illegally inside these reserves. The Indonesian government, still reeling after the crash of the Asian economy, has no money for park rangers so law enforcement around the Riau wildife reserves is virtually non-existent. When elephant herds venture out to dine on tasty oil palms or raid village crop fields, both elephants and people end up dead. Elephants caught off the reserves that are not killed are often held in one of hundreds of "elephant orphanages" on Sumatra that, according to the National Zoo's Christen Wemmer, are more like concentration camps.
"These elephants are refugees of deforestation," says Wemmer, head of the Zoo's Conservation and Research Center. "They get no real veterinary care, they often suffer from malnutrition, and they basically just idle their lives away in these camps. Wildlife is not a priority for the Indonesian government. Palm oil plantations are."
Some of the most powerful conservation organizations in the world, including the World Wildlife Fund, Fauna & Flora International, the International Elephant Foundation, and a constellation of other organizations have taken up the cause of the Sumatran elephants and have found the Indonesian government cooperative if unable to help financially. Traditional elephant handlers, called mahouts, were even flown in from Thailand because the Sumatrans had no idea how to manage wild elephants. For now, three-way negotiations between Western conservation organizations, the Indonesian government, and palm oil companies are continuing, but Wemmer isn't very optimistic. He explains that the biggest problem is that most Sumatrans are more interested in making money from oil palms than saving elephants, and it's a hard point to argue with desperate people who often see wilderness as equivalent to underdevelopment.
"They would be very happy if they could ship every elephant off that island to Western zoos," Wemmer says sadly. "Elephants just aren't part of the picture for them."
-John Tidwell
ZooGoer 31(2) 2001. Copyright 2002 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
