Africa, Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines

/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS-INDIA: A Saviour for Asian Elephants

Sonny Inbaraj

BANGKOK, Oct 18 2004 (IPS) - Every creature, from a louse to a lyrebird, is a marvel of nature. But some marvels are just more marvellous than others – and none more so than an elephant.

Consider this animal again and all it shares with us. Elephants live sixty to eighty years, the same span as humans.

”Even when they sleep, elephants resemble us. They snore, take siestas in the midday heat, and use hummocks and bushes as pillows. Most of all, they resemble (perhaps even surpass) us in the depth and durability of their familial attachments and affective communications,” writes Eric Scigliano in his seminal ‘Love, War, and Circuses: The Age- Old Relationship Between Elephants and Humans’.

Like the love of humans and chimpanzees, elephants’ affections endure after loved ones die.

According to Scigliano, elephants’ ‘graveyards’ may be fables, but elephants perform something like burial services: watching over and evidently mourning their dead, and even returning to the sites of death, fondling bones and tusks – and shattering them, as though to release their spirits.

But these human-like attributes are the factors that are causing the decimation of elephant populations at an alarming rate.

”This is a slow breeding, long-living, highly intelligent and highly social animal and ironically all these four things are against it when it comes to their survival,” says Vivek Menon, the author of ‘Tusker – The Story of the Asian Elephant’, in an interview.

”Since their life cycle is like us, the average human will not be able to see and experience the decline of the species. Were elephants grasshoppers or guinea pigs, the sudden crash in population would be there for all of us to see,” adds Menon, a conservation biologist and photographer.

‘Tusker’ is the sad story of slaughter of Asian elephants, in smaller numbers than the African elephants, but significant nevertheless in India. There are an estimated 45,000 Asian elephants in the wild, about half of those in India, according to experts.

The little-known book internationally was an invaluable guide to journalists covering the recently concluded 13th Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), held for 12 days in the Thai capital.

Considered the world’s most important wildlife agreement, CITES is the only global treaty that regulates trade in threatened and endangered animals and plants. At the Bangkok conference, the 166 CITES member nations parties discussed 48 species and species groups involved in international trade.

‘Tusker’ helped throw light on the debate that the lifting of the ban on ivory trade in Africa, a proposal put forward by Namibia at the CITES conference, will seriously threaten the survival of Asian elephants whose numbers are fast dwindling in the region.

At the last week of the CITES conference, Namibia’s proposal for annual sales of up to 2,000 kilogrammes of ivory was rejected.

Between 1997 and 2000, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe were allowed by CITES to carry out limited sales of ivory to Japan – the nerve center of the world ivory trade for the manufacture of signature seals known as ‘hankos’ in Japanese.

According to conservationists, special sales to the Japanese have triggered more elephant killings. Poachers know that any legal trade can disguise the laundering of illegal Asian ivory.

”The problem is that the Japanese distinguish between Asian and African ivory,” says Menon.

”If they pay different rates for ivory, Asian ivory will always have a premium and the moment ivory trade anywhere is sanctioned in any sort of way or form, illegal Asian ivory will find its way into the Japanese market,” he points out.

Only the male Asian elephant is tusked, unlike their cousins in Africa where both males and females have tusks. This according to Menon is a fundamental difference that matters greatly to the survival of the Asian elephant when it comes to the ivory trade.

”When a poacher kills a male Asian elephant for its tusks, he not only removes an individual elephant but also a breeding male. This is a selective removal of males from a dwindling elephant population,” he points out.

In ‘Tusker’, Menon takes the reader not just to the various corners of India but also westward to the Middle Eastern countries and eastward from Burma to Japan.

”It was an extensive trail and certainly one of the most exciting periods of my life,” recalls Menon. ”Just for two years I followed ivory from India, across the 13 range states and few consumer nations in Asia. I did nothing else – that’s really the core of the book.”

In his undercover work, Menon always used the disguise of an Indian businessman based in Dubai on the lookout for ivory buyers.

”It worked like a charm. Everywhere I went I could pull that disguise off,” he tells IPS. ”Because I was an Indian, they thought I could get them Indian ivory. And Indian ivory is very valuable to the Japanese, especially when they are willing to pay twice or even three times that of African ivory.”

Although his primary work has been in issues related to CITES and wildlife trade, Menon has founded or co-founded five environmental and conservation organisations in India.

In 2002, he won the prestigious Rufford Award for Nature Conservation. Menon is also a member of four specialist groups of IUCN – the World Conservation Union.

Without doubt ‘Tusker’ played its part in the CITES ivory battles in terms of raising awareness among the official country delegates present at these biennial conferences, where at the end of the day every vote counts for the survival of a species.

But the task for Menon has not been easy.

”In CITES lobbying you need to cultivate people for which you are not supposed to show your emotions. You’re not supposed to show your passions half the time,” he reveals. ”You’re supposed to be able to swing people towards you. That’s a difficult transition for somebody who comes from doing things in the field.”